The  Creed  of  the  Old  South 


IRLF 


SB 


535 


1865-1915 


in 


c\j 

QQ 


GIFT    OF 
EVGENE 


THE  CREED  OF  THE 
OLD  SOUTH 


BALTIMOBB,  MD.f  U.  S.  A. 


1865 


1915 


THE  CREED  OF 
THE  OLD  SOUTH 

1865-1915 

BY 

BASIL  L.  GILDERSLEEVE 


BALTIMORE 

THE  JOHNS  HOPKINS  PRESS 
1915 


/•v. 


COPYRIGHT,  1915, 

BY 
TFIE  JOHNS  HOPKINS  PRESS 


PREFACE 

In  the  last  score  of  years  I  have  often  been 
urged  by  friends  and  sympathizers  to  bring 
out  as  a  separate  issue  my  article,  The  Creed 
of  the  Old  South,  which  appeared  in  the 
Atlantic  Monthly  of  January,  1892,  and 
which  attracted  wider  attention  than  anything 
I  have  ever  written.  As  this  is  the  jubilee  of 
the  great  year  1865,  the  memories  of  that  dis 
tant  time  come  thronging  back  to  the  actors  in 
the  momentous  struggle,  and  I  am  prompted 
to  publish  in  more  accessible  form  my  record 
of  views  and  impressions  that  may  seem 
strange  even  to  the  survivors  of  the  conflict, 
now  rapidly  passing  away.  To  this  paper  I 
have  added  an  essay  on  a  cognate  theme — 
A  Southerner  in  the  Peloponnesian  War — 
which  was  published  in  the  Atlantic  Monthly 
of  September,  1897,  and  which  has  been 
accepted  by  the  eminent  historian,  Mr. 
Rhodes,  as  an  historical  document.  These 

333749 


PREFACE 


specimens  of  what  I  call  my  Sargasso  work 
("Weeds  from  the  Atlantic")  are  repro 
duced  by  the  kind  permission  of  the  Houghton 
Mifflin  Company.  A  few  slips  of  pen  and 
type  have  been  corrected,  and  a  few  notes  out 
of  the  mass  of  literature  evoked  by  the  first 
essay,  or  akin  to  it,  have  been  added  for  the 
benefit  of  the  third  generation. 


THE  JOHNS  HOPKINS  UNIVERSITY, 
JUNE,  1915. 


THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH 

A  few  months  ago,  as  I  was  leaving  Balti 
more  for  a  summer  sojourn  on  the  coast  of 
Maine,  two  old  soldiers  of  the  war  between 
the  States  took  their  seats  immediately  behind 
me  in  the  car,  and  began  a  lively  conversation 
about  the  various  battles  in  which  they  had 
faced  each  other  more  than  a  quarter  of  a  cen 
tury  ago,  when  a  trip  to  New  England  would 
have  been  no  holiday  jaunt  for  one  of  their 
fellow-travellers.  The  veterans  went  into  the 
minute  detail  that  always  puts  me  to  shame, 
when  I  think  how  poor  an  account  I  should 
give,  if  pressed  to  describe  the  military  move 
ments  that  I  have  happened  to  witness ;  and  I 
may  as  well  acknowledge  at  the  outset  that  I 
have  as  little  aptitude  for  the  soldier's  trade 
as  I  have  for  the  romancer's.  Single  incidents 
I  remember  as  if  they  were  of  yesterday. 
Single  pictures  have  burned  themselves  into 


8      THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH 

my  brain.  But  I  have  no  vocation  to  tell  how 
fields  were  lost  and  won;  and  my  experience 
of  military  life  was  too  brief  and  desultory  to 
be  of  any  value  to  the  historian  of  the  war. 
For  my  own  life  that  experience  has  been  of 
the  utmost  significance,  and  despite  the  heavy 
price  I  have  had  to  pay  for  my  outings, 
despite  the  daily  reminder  of  five  long  months 
of  intense  suffering,  I  have  no  regrets.  An 
able-bodied  young  man,  with  a  long  vacation 
at  his  disposal,  could  not  have  done  otherwise, 
and  the  right  to  teach  Southern  youth  for  nine 
months  was  earned  by  sharing  the  fortunes  of 
their  fathers  and  brothers  at  the  front  for 
three.  Self-respect  is  everything;  and  it  is 
something  to  have  belonged  in  deed  and  in 
truth  to  an  heroic  generation,  to  have  shared 
in  a  measure  its  perils  and  privations.  But  that 
heroic  generation  is  apt  to  be  a  bore  to  a  gener 
ation  whose  heroism  is  of  a  different  type,  and 
I  doubt  whether  the  young  people  in  our  car 
took  much  interest  in  the  very  audible  con 
versation  of  the  two  veterans.  Twenty-five 
years  hence,  when  the  survivors  will  be  curiosi- 


THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH  9 

ties,  as  were  Revolutionary  pensioners  in  my 
childhood,  there  may  be  a  renewal  of  interest. 
As  it  is,  few  of  the  present  generation  pore 
over  The  Battles  and  Leaders  of  the  Civil 
War,  and  a  grizzled  old  Confederate  has 
been  heard  to  declare  that  he  intended  to  be 
queath  his  copy  of  that  valuable  work  to  some 
one  outside  of  the  family,  so  provoked  was  he 
at  the  supineness  of  his  children.  And  yet,  for 
the  truth's  sake,  all  these  battles  must  be 
fought  over  and  over  again,  until  the  account 
is  cleared,  and  until  justice  is  done  to  the  valor 
and  skill  of  both  sides. 

The  two  old  soldiers  were  talking  ami 
cably  enough,  as  all  old  soldiers  do,  but  they 
"  yarned,"  as  all  old  soldiers  do,  and  though 
they  talked  from  Baltimore  to  Philadelphia, 
and  from  Philadelphia  to  New  York,  their 
conversation  was  lost  on  me,  for  my  thoughts 
went  back  into  my  own  past,  and  two  pictures 
came  up  to  me  from  the  time  of  the  war. 

In  the  midsummer  of  1863  I  was  serving 
as  a  private  in  the  First  Virginia  Cavalry. 
Gettysburg  was  in  the  past,  and  there  was  not 


io  THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH 

—        • — __ 1 

much  fighting  to  be  done,  but  the  cavalry  was 
not  wholly  idle.  Raids  had  to  be  intercepted, 
and  the  enemy  was  not  to  be  allowed  to  vaunt 
himself  too  much;  so  that  I  gained  some  expe 
rience  of  the  hardships  of  that  arm  of  the  serv 
ice,  and  found  out  by  practical  participation 
what  is  meant  by  a  cavalry  charge.  To  a 
looker-on  nothing  can  be  finer.  To  the  one  who 
charges,  or  is  supposed  to  charge, — for  the 
horse  seemed  to  me  mainly  responsible, — the 
details  are  somewhat  cumbrous.  Now  in  one 
of  these  charges  some  of  us  captured  a  number 
of  the  opposing  force,  among  them  a  young 
lieutenant.  Why  this  particular  capture  should 
have  impressed  me  so  I  cannot  tell,  but  mem 
ory  is  a  tricky  thing.  A  large  red  fox  scared 
up  from  his  lair  by  the  fight  at  Castleman's 
Ferry  stood  for  a  moment  looking  at  me ;  and 
I  shall  never  forget  the  stare  of  that  red  fox. 
At  one  of  our  fights  near  Kernstown  a  spent 
bullet  struck  a  horse  on  the  side  of  his  nose, 
which  happened  to  be  white,  and  left  a  perfect 
imprint  of  itself;  and  the  jerk  of  the  horse's 
head  and  the  outline  of  the  bullet  are  present 


THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH     n 

to  me  still.  The  explosion  of  a  particular 
caisson,  the  shriek  of  a  special  shell,  will  ring 
in  one's  ears  for  life.  A  captured  lieutenant 
was  no  novelty,  and  yet  this  captured  lieuten 
ant  caught  my  eye  and  held  it.  A  handsomer 
young  fellow,  a  more  noble-looking,  I  never 
beheld  among  Federals  or  Confederates,  as 
he  stood  there,  bare-headed,  among  his  cap 
tors,  erect  and  silent.  His  eyes  were  full  of 
fire,  his  lips  showed  a  slight  quiver  of  scorn, 
and  his  hair  seemed  to  tighten  its  curls  in  de 
fiance.  Doubtless  I  had  seen  as  fine  specimens 
of  young  manhood  before,  but  if  so,  I  had  seen 
without  looking,  and  this  man  was  evidently 
what  we  called  a  gentleman. 

Southern  men  were  proud  of  being  gentle 
men,  although  they  have  been  told  in  every 
conceivable  tone  that  it  was  a  foolish  pride, — 
foolish  in  itself,  foolish  in  that  it  did  not  have 
the  heraldic  backing  that  was  claimed  for  it; 
the  utmost  concession  being  that  a  number  of 
"  deboshed  "  younger  sons  of  decayed  gentry 
had  been  shipped  to  Virginia  in  the  early  set 
tlement  of  that  colony.  But  the  very  pride 


iz  THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH 

played  its  part  in  making  us  what  we  were 
proud  of  being,  and  whether  descendants  of 
the  aforesaid  "  deboshed,"  of  simple  English 
yeomen,  of  plain  Scotch-Irish  Presbyterians, 
a  sturdy  stock,  of  Huguenots  of  various  ranks 
of  life,  we  all  held  to  the  same  standard,  and 
showed,  as  was  thought,  undue  exclusiveness 
on  this  subject.  But  this  prisoner  was  the  em 
bodiment  of  the  best  type  of  Northern  youth, 
with  a  spirit  as  high,  as  resolute,  as  could  be 
found  in  the  ranks  of  Southern  gentlemen ;  and 
though  in  theory  all  enlightened  Southerners 
recognized  the  high  qualities  of  some  of  our 
opponents,  this  one  noble  figure  in  "  flesh  and 
blood  "  was  better  calculated  to  inspire  respect 
for  "  those  people,"  as  we  had  learned  to  call 
our  adversaries,  than  many  pages  of  "  gray 
theory." 

A  little  more  than  a  year  afterwards,  in 
Early's  Valley  campaign, — a  rude  school  of 
warfare, — I  was  serving  as  a  volunteer  aide 
on  General  Gordon's  staff.  The  day  before 
the  disaster  of  Fisher's  Hill  I  was  ordered, 
together  with  another  staff  officer,  to  accom- 


THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH  13 

pany  the  general  on  a  ride  to  the  front.  The 
general  had  a  well-known  weakness  for  in 
specting  the  outposts, — a  weakness  that  made 
a  position  in  his  suite  somewhat  precarious. 
The  officer  with  whom  I  was  riding  had  not 
been  with  us  long,  and  when  he  joined  the  staff 
had  just  recovered  from  wounds  and  imprison 
ment  A  man  of  winning  appearance,  sweet 
temper,  and  attractive  manners,  he  soon  made 
friends  of  the  military  family,  and  I  never 
learned  to  love  a  man  so  much  in  so  brief  an 
acquaintance,  though  hearts  knit  quickly  in 
the  stress  of  war.  He  was  highly  educated, 
and  foreign  residence  and  travel  had  widened 
his  vision  without  affecting  the  simple  faith 
and  thorough  consecration  of  the  Christian. 
Here  let  me  say  that  the  bearing  of  the  Con 
federates  is  not  to  be  understood  without  tak 
ing  into  account  the  deep  religious  feeling  of 
the  army  and  its  great  leaders.  It  is  an  his 
torical  element,  like  any  other,  and  is  not  to  be 
passed  over  in  summing  up  the  forces  of  the 
conflict.  "  A  soldier  without  religion/'  says 
a  Prussian  officer,  who  knew  our  army  as  well 


H     THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH 

: i 

as  the  German,  "  is  an  instrument  without 
value  ";  and  it  is  not  unlikely  that  the  knowl 
edge  of  the  part  that  faith  played  in  sustain 
ing  the  Southern  people  may  have  lent  empha 
sis  to  the  expression  of  his  conviction. 

We  rode  together  towards  the  front,  and  as 
we  rode  our  talk  fell  on  Goethe  and  on  Faust, 
and  of  all  passages  the  soldiers'  song  came  up 
to  my  lips, — the  song  of  soldiers  of  fortune, 
not  the  chant  of  men  whose  business  it  was  to 
defend  their  country.  Two  lines,  however, 
were  significant: — 

Kuhn  ist  das  Muhen, 
Herrlich  der  Lohn. 

We  reached  the  front.  An  occasional  "  zip  " 
gave  warning  that  the  sharpshooters  were  not 
asleep,  and  the  quick  eye  of  the  general  saw 
that  our  line  needed  rectification  and  how. 
Brief  orders  were  given  to  the  officer  in  com 
mand.  My  comrade  was  left  to  aid  in  carry 
ing  them  out.  The  rest  of  us  withdrew. 
Scarcely  had  we  ridden  a  hundred  yards 
towards  camp  when  a  shout  was  heard,  and, 


THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH  15 

turning  round,  we  saw  one  of  the  men  running 
after  us.  "  The  captain  had  been  killed." 
The  peace  of  heaven  was  on  his  face,  as  I 
gazed  on  the  noble  features  that  afternoon. 
The  bullet  had  passed  through  his  official 
papers  and  found  his  heart.  He  had  received 
his  discharge,  and  the  glorious  reward  had 
been  won. 

This  is  the  other  picture  that  the  talk  of  the 
two  old  soldiers  called  up, — dead  Confederate 
against  living  Federal ;  and  these  two  pictures 
stand  out  before  me  again,  as  I  am  trying  to 
make  others  understand  and  to  understand 
myself  what  it  was  to  be  a  Southern  man 
twenty-five  years  ago;  what  it  was  to  accept 
with  the  whole  heart  the  creed  of  the  Old 
South.  The  image  of  the  living  Federal  bids 
me  refrain  from  harsh  words  in  the  presence 
of  those  who  were  my  captors.  The  dead 
Confederate  bids  me  uncover  the  sacred  mem 
ories  that  the  dust  of  life's  Appian  Way  hides 
from  the  tenderest  and  truest  of  those  whose 
business  it  is  to  live  and  work.  For  my  dead 
comrade  of  the  Valley  campaign  is  one  of 


16  THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH 

many;  some  of  them  my  friends,  some  of  them 
my  pupils  as  well.  The  i8th  of  July,  1861, 
laid  low  one  of  my  Princeton  College  room 
mates  ;  on  the  2  ist,  the  day  of  the  great  battle, 
the  other  fell, — both  bearers  of  historic  names, 
both  upholding  the  cause  of  their  State  with 
as  unclouded  a  conscience  as  any  saint  in  the 
martyrology  ever  wore ;  and  from  that  day  to 
the  end,  great  battle  and  outpost  skirmish 
brought  me,  week  by  week,  a  personal  loss  in 
men  of  the  same  type. 

The  surrender  of  the  Spartans  on  the  island 
of  Sphacteria  was  a  surprise  to  friend  and  foe 
alike ;  and  the  severe  historian  of  the  Pelopon- 
nesian  war  pauses  to  record  the  answer  of  a 
Spartan  to  the  jeering  question  of  one  of  the 
allies  of  the  Athenians, — a  question  which  im 
plied  that  the  only  brave  Spartans  were  those 
who  had  been  slain.  The  answer  was  tipped 
with  Spartan  wit;  the  only  thing  Spartan,  as 
some  one  has  said,  in  the  whole  un-Spartan 
affair.  "  The  arrow,"  said  he,  "  would  be 
of  great  price  if  it  distinguished  the  brave  men 
from  the  cowards."  But  it  did  seem  to  us,  in 


THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH  17 

our  passionate  grief,  that  the  remorseless  bul 
let,  the  remorseless  shell,  had  picked  out  the 
bravest  and  the  purest.  It  is  an  old  cry, — 

Ja,  der  Krieg  verschlingt  die  Besten. 

Still,  w|ien  Schiller  says  in  the  poem  just 
quoted, 

Ohne  Wahl  vertheilt  die  Gaben, 
Ohne  Billigkeit  das  Gliick, 
Denn  Patroklus  liegt  begraben 
Und  Thersites  kommt  zuruck, 

his  illustration  is  only  half  right.  The  Greek 
Thersites  did  not  return  to  claim  a  pension. 

Of  course,  what  was  to  all  true  Confederates 
beyond  a  question  "  a  holy  cause,"  "  the  hol^st 
of  causes,"  this  fight  in  defence  of  "  the  sacred 
soil  "  of  our  native  land,  was  to  the  other  side 
"  a  wicked  rebellion  "  and  "  damnable  trea 
son,"  and  both  parties  to  the  quarrel  were  not 
sparing  of  epithets  which,  at  this  distance  of 
time,  may  seem  to  our  children  unnecessarily 
undignified;  and  no  doubt  some  of  these  epi- 
theta  ornantia  continue  to  flourish  in  remote 
regions,  just  as  pictorial  representations  of 


i8  THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH 

Yankees  and  rebels  in  all  their  respective 
fiendishness  are  still  cherished  here  and  there. 
At  the  Centennial  Exposition  of  1876,  by  way 
of  conciliating  the  sections,  the  place  of  honour 
in  the  "  Art  Annex,"  was  given  to  RothermeFs 
painting  of  the  battle  of  Gettysburg,  in  which 
the  face  of  every  dying  Union  soldier  is  lighted 
up  with  a  celestial  smile,  while  guilt  and  despair 
are  stamped  on  the  wan  countenances  of  the 
moribund  rebels.  At  least  such  is  my  recol 
lection  of  the  painting;  and  I  hope  that  I  may 
be  pardoned  for  the  malicious  pleasure  I  felt 
when  I  was  informed  of  the  high  price  that  the 
State  of  Pennsylvania  had  paid  for  that  work 
of  art.  The  dominant  feeling  was  amuse 
ment,  not  indignation.  But  as  I  looked  at  it  I 
recalled  another  picture  of  a  battle-scene, 
painted  by  a  friend  of  mine,  a  French  artist, 
who  had  watched  our  life  with  an  artist's  eye. 
One  of  the  figures  in  the  foreground  was  a 
dead  Confederate  boy,  lying  in  the  angle  of  a 
worm  fence.  His  uniform  was  worn  and 
ragged,  mud-stained  as  well  as  blood-stained; 
the  cap  which  had  fallen  from  his  head  was  a 


THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH  19 

tatter,  and  the  torn  shoes  were  ready  to  drop 
from  his  stiffening  feet;  but  in  a  buttonhole  of 
his  tunic  was  stuck  the  inevitable  toothbrush, 
which  continued  even  to  the  end  of  the  war  to 
be  the  distinguishing  mark  of  gentle  nurture, — 
the  souvenir  that  the  Confederate  so  often 
received  from  fair  sympathizers  in  border 
towns.  I  am  not  a  realist,  but  I  would  not 
exchange  that  homely  toothbrush  in  the  Con 
federate's  buttonhole  for  the  most  angelic 
smile  that  Rothermel's  brush  could  have  con 
jured  up. 

Now  I  make  no  doubt  that  most  of  the 
readers  of  The  Atlantic  have  got  beyond  the 
Rothermel  stage,  and  yet  I  am  not  certain 
that  all  of  them  appreciate  the  entire  clearness 
of  conscience  with  which  we  of  the  South  went 
into  the  war.  A  new  patriotism  is  one  of  the 
results  of  the  great  conflict,  and  the  power  of 
local  patriotism  is  no  longer  felt  to  the  same 
degree.  In  one  of  his  recent  deliverances  Mr. 
Carnegie,  a  canny  Scot  who  has  constituted 
himself  the  representative  of  American  pa 
triotism,  says,  "  The  citizen  of  the  republic 


20  THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH 

to-day  is  prouder  of  being  an  American  than 
he  is  of  being  a  native  of  any  State  in  the 
country."  What  it  is  to  be  a  native  of  any 
State  in  the  country,  especially  an  old  State 
with  an  ancient  and  honorable  history,  is  some 
thing  that  Mr.  Carnegie  cannot  possibly  un 
derstand.  But  the  "  to-day  "  is  superfluous. 
The  Union  was  a  word  of  power  in  1861  as 
it  is  in  1891.  Before  the  secession  of  Virginia 
a  Virginian  Breckinridge  asked:  "  If  exiled 
in  a  foreign  land,  would  the  heart  turn  back  to 
Virginia,  or  South  Carolina,  or  New  York,  or 
to  any  one  State  as  the  cherished  home  of  its 
pride?  No.  We  would  remember  only  that 
we  were  Americans."  Surely  this  seems  quite 
as  patriotic  as  Mr.  Carnegie's  utterance ;  and 
yet,  to  the  native  Virginian  just  quoted,  so 
much  stronger  was  the  State  than  the  central 
government  that,  a  few  weeks  after  this  bold 
speech,  he  went  into  the  war,  and  finally  per 
ished  in  the  war.  "  A  Union  man,"  says  his 
biographer,  "  fighting  for  the  rights  of  his  old 
mother,  Virginia."  And  there  were  many  men 
of  his  mind,  noted  generals,  valiant  soldiers. 


THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH  21 

The  University  Memorial,  which  records  the 
names  and  lives  of  the  alumni  of  the  University 
of  Virginia  who  fell  in  the  Confederate  war, 
two  hundred  in  number, — this  volume,  full 
"  of  memories  and  of  sighs  "  to  every  South 
ern  man  of  my  age,  lies  open  before  me  as  I 
write,  and  some  of  the  noblest  men  who  figure 
in  its  pages  were  Union  men;  and  the  Memo 
rial  of  the  Virginia  Military  Institute  tells  the 
same  story  with  the  same  eloquence.  The 
State  was  imperilled,  and  parties  disappeared; 
and  of  the  combatants  in  the  field,  some  of  the 
bravest  and  the  most  conspicuous  belonged  to 
those  whose  love  of  the  old  Union  was  warm 
and  strong,  to  whom  the  severance  of  the  tie 
that  bound  the  States  together  was  a  personal 
grief.  But  even  those  who  prophesied  the 
worst,  who  predicted  a  long  and  bloody 
struggle  and  a  doubtful  result,  had  no  question 
about  the  duty  of  the  citizen;  shared  the  com 
mon  burden  and  submitted  to  the  individual 
sacrifice  as  readily  as  the  veriest  fire-eater, — 
nay,  as  they  claimed,  more  readily.  The  most 
intimate  friend  I  ever  had,  who  fell  after 


22  THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH 

heroic  services,  was  known  by  all  our  circle  to 
be  utterly  at  variance  with  the  prevalent  South 
ern  view  of  the  quarrel,  and  died  upholding  a 
right  which  was  not  a  right  to  him  except  so 
far  as  the  mandate  of  his  State  made  it  a  right; 
and  while  he  would  have  preferred  to  see  "  the 
old  flag  "  floating  over  a  united  people,  he 
restored  the  new  banner  to  its  place  time  after 
time  when  it  had  been  cut  down  by  shot  and 
shell. 

Those  who  were  bred  in  the  opposite  polit 
ical  faith,  who  read  their  right  of  withdrawal 
in  the  Constitution,  had  less  heart-searching  to 
begin  with  than  the  Union  men  of  the  South ; 
but  when  the  State  called  there  were  no  parties, 
and  the  only  trace  of  the  old  difference  was 
a  certain  rivalry  which  should  do  the  better 
fighting.  This  ready  response  to  the  call  of 
the  State  showed  very  clearly  that,  despite 
varying  theories  of  government,  the  people  of 
the  Southern  States  were  practically  of  one 
mind  as  to  the  seat  of  the  paramount  obliga 
tion.  Adherence  to  the  Union  was  a  matter 
of  sentiment,  a  matter  of  interest.  The  argu- 


THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH  23 

ments  urged  on  the  South  against  secession 
were  addressed  to  the  memories  of  the  glorious 
struggle  for  independence,  to  the  anticipation 
of  the  glorious  future  that  awaited  the  united 
country,  to  the  difficulties  and  the  burdens  of  a 
separate  life.  Especial  stress  was  laid  on  the 
last  argument;  and  the  expense  of  a  separate 
government,  of  a  standing  army,  was  set  forth 
in  appalling  figures.  A  Northern  student  of 
the  war  once  said  to  me,  "  If  the  Southern 
people  had  been  of  a  statistical  turn,  there 
would  have  been  no  secession,  there  would 
have  been  no  war."  But  there  were  men 
enough  of  a  statistical  turn  in  the  South  to 
warn  the  people  against  the  enormous  expense 
of  independence,  just  as  there  are  men  enough 
of  a  statistical  turn  in  Italy  to  remind  the  Ital 
ians  of  the  enormous  cost  of  national  unity. 
"  Counting  the  cost  "  is  in  things  temporal  the 
only  wise  course,  as  in  the  building  of  a  tower; 
but  there  are  times  in  the  life  of  an  individual, 
of  a  people,  when  the  things  that  are  eternal 
force  themselves  into  the  calculation,  and  the 
abacus  is  nowhere.  "  Neither  count  I  my  life 


24  THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH 

dear  unto  myself  "  is  a  sentiment  that  does  not 
enter  into  the  domain  of  statistics.  The  great 
Athenian  statesman  who  saw  the  necessity  of 
the  Peloponnesian  war  was  not  above  statistics, 
as  he  showed  when  he  passed  in  review  the  re 
sources  of  the  Athenian  empire,  the  tribute 
from  the  allies,  the  treasure  laid  up  in  the 
House  of  the  Virgin.  But  when  he  addressed 
the  people  in  justification  of  the  war,  he  based 
his  argument,  not  on  a  calculation  of  material 
resources,  but  on  a  simple  principle  of  right. 
Submission  to  any  encroachment,  the  least  as 
well  as  the  greatest,  on  the  rights  of  a  State 
means  slavery.  To  us  submission  meant 
slavery,  as  it  did  to  Pericles  and  the  Athe 
nians  ;  as  it  did  to  the  great  historian  of  Greece, 
who  had  learned  this  lesson  from  the  Pelopon 
nesian  war,  and  who  took  sides  with  the  South 
ern  States,  to  the  great  dismay  of  his  fellow- 
radicals,  who  could  not  see,  as  George  Grote 
saw,  the  real  point  at  issue  in  the  controversy. 
Submission  is  slavery,  and  the  bitterest  taunt 
in  the  vocabulary  of  those  who  advocated 
secession  was  "  submissionist."  But  where 


THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH  25 

does  submission  begin?  Who  is  to  mark  the 
point  of  encroachment?  That  is  a  matter 
which  must  be  decided  by  the  sovereign ;  and 
on  the  theory  that  the  States  are  sovereign, 
each  State  must  be  the  judge.  The  extreme 
Southern  States  considered  their  rights  men 
aced  by  the  issue  of  the  presidential  election. 
Virginia  and  the  Border  States  were  more  de 
liberate;  and  Virginia's  "pausing"  was  the 
theme  of  much  mockery  in  the  State  and  out  of 
it,  from  friend  and  from  foe  alike.  Her  love 
of  peace,  her  love  of  the  Union,  were  set  down 
now  to  cowardice,  now  to  cunning.  The 
Mother  of  States  and  Queller  of  Tyrants  was 
caricatured  as  Mrs.  Facing-both-ways ;  and  the 
great  commonwealth  that  even  Mr.  Lodge's 
statistics  cannot  displace  from  her  leadership 
in  the  history  of  the  country  was  charged  with 
trading  on  her  neutrality.  Her  solemn  pro 
test  was  unheeded.  The  "  serried  phalanx  of 
her  gallant  sons  "  that  should  "  prevent  the 
passage  of  the  United  States  forces  "  was  an 
expression  that  amused  Northern  critics  of 
style  as  a  bit  of  antiquated  Southern  rodomon- 


26  THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH 

tade.  But  the  call  for  troops  showed  that  the 
rodomontade  meant  something.  Virginia  had 
made  her  decision;  and  if  the  United  States 
forces  did  not  find  a  serried  phalanx  barring 
their  way, — a  serried  phalanx  is  somewhat 
out  of  date, — they  found  something  that  an 
swered  the  purpose  as  well. 

The  war  began,  the  war  went  on.  Passion 
was  roused  to  fever  heat.  Both  sides  "  saw 
red,"  that  physiological  condition  which  to  a 
Frenchman  excuses  everything.  The  pro 
verbial  good  humor  of  the  American  people 
did  not,  it  is  true,  desert  the  country,  and  the 
Southern  men  who  were  in  the  field,  as  they 
were  much  happier  than  those  who  stayed  at 
home,  if  I  may  judge  by  my  own  experience, 
were  often  merry  enough  by  the  camp  fire,  and 
exchanged  rough  jests  with  the  enemy's  pick 
ets.  But  the  invaded  people  were  very  much 
in  earnest,  however  lightly  some  of  their 
adversaries  treated  the  matter,  and  as  the  pres 
sure  of  the  war  grew  tighter  the  more  sombre 
did  life  become.  A  friend  of  mine,  describing 
the  crowd  that  besieged  the  Gare  de  Lyon  in 


THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH  27 

Paris,  when  the  circle  of  fire  was  drawing 
round  the  city,  and  foreigners  were  hastening 
to  escape,  told  me  that  the  press  was  so  great 
that  he  could  touch  in  every  direction  those 
who  had  been  crushed  to  death  as  they  stood, 
and  had  not  had  room  to  fall.  Not  wholly 
unlike  this  was  the  pressure  brought  to  bear  on 
the  Confederacy.  It  was  only  necessary  to 
put  out  your  hand  and  you  touched  a  corpse ; 
and  that  not  an  alien  corpse,  but  the  corpse  of 
a  brother  or  a  friend.  Every  Southern  man 
becomes  grave  when  he  thinks  of  that  terrible 
stretch  of  time,  partly,  it  is  true,  because  life 
was  nobler,  but  chiefly  because  of  the  mem 
ories  of  sorrow  and  suffering.  A  professional 
Southern  humorist  once  undertook  to  write  in 
dialect  a  Comic  History  of  the  War,  but  his 
heart  failed  him,  as  his  public  would  have 
failed  him,  and  the  serial  lived  only  for  a  num 
ber  or  two. 

The  war  began,  the  war  went  on.  War  is 
a  rough  game.  It  is  an  omelet  that  cannot  be 
made  without  breaking  eggs,  not  only  eggs 
in  esse,  but  also  eggs  in  posse.  So  far  as  I 


28  THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH 

have  read  about  war,  ours  was  no  worse  than 
some  other  wars.  While  it  lasted,  the  conduct 
of  the  combatants  on  either  side  was  repre 
sented  in  the  blackest  colors  by  the  other.  Even 
the  ordinary  and  legitimate  doing  to  death  was 
considered  criminal  if  the  deed  was  done  by  a 
ruthless  rebel  or  a  ruffianly  invader.  Non- 
combatants  were  especially  eloquent.  In  de 
scribing  the  end  of  a  brother  who  had  been 
killed  while  trying  to  get  a  shot  at  a  Yankee, 
a  Southern  girl  raved  about  the  "  murdered 
patriot  "  and  the  "  dastardly  wretch  "  who 
had  anticipated  him.  But  I  do  not  criticize,  for 
I  remember  an  English  account  of  the  battle  of 
New  Orleans,  in  which  General  Pakenham 
was  represented  as  having  been  picked  off  by 
a  "  sneaking  Yankee  rifle."  Those  who  were 
engaged  in  the  actual  conflict  took  more  rea 
sonable  views,  and  the  annals  of  the  war  are 
full  of  stories  of  battlefield  and  hospital  in 
which  a  common  humanity  asserted  itself.  But 
brotherhood  there  was  none.  No  alienation 
could  have  been  more  complete.  Into  the 
cleft  made  by  the  disruption  poured  all  the 


THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH  29 

bad  blood  that  had  been  breeding  from  colo 
nial  times,  from  Revolutionary  times,  from 
constitutional  struggles,  from  congressional 
debates,  from  "  bleeding  Kansas  "  and  the  en 
gine-house  at  Harper's  Ferry;  and  a  great  gulf 
was  fixed,  as  it  seemed  forever,  between  North 
and  South.  The  hostility  was  a  very  satis 
factory  one — for  military  purposes. 

The  war  began,  the  war  went  on, — this 
politicians'  conspiracy,  this  slaveholders'  rebel 
lion,  as  it  was  variously  called  by  those  who 
sought  its  source,  now  in  the  disappointed  ambi 
tion  of  the  Southern  leaders,  now  in  the  desper 
ate  determination  of  a  slaveholding  oligarchy 
to  perpetuate  their  power,  and  to  secure  for 
ever  their  proprietorship  in  their  "  human 
chattels."  On  this  theory  the  mass  of  Southern 
people  were  but  puppets  in  the  hands  of  politi 
cal  wirepullers,  or  blind  followers  of  hectoring 
"  patricians."  To  those  who  know  the  South 
ern  people  nothing  can  be  more  absurd;  to 
those  who  know  their  personal  independence, 
to  those  who  know  the  deep  interest  which 
they  have  always  taken  in  politics,  the  keen 

3 


30  THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH 

intelligence  with  which  they  have  always  fol 
lowed  the  questions  of  the  day.  The  court 
house  green  was  the  political  university  of  the 
Southern  masses,  and  the  hustings  the  profes 
sorial  chair,  from  which  the  great  political 
and  economical  questions  of  the  day  were  pre 
sented,  to  say  the  least,  as  fully  and  intelli 
gently  as  in  the  newspapers  to  which  so  much 
enlightenment  is  attributed.  There  was  no 
such  system  of  rotten  boroughs,  no  such  domi 
nation  of  a  landed  aristocracy,  throughout  the 
South  as  has  been  imagined,  and  venality, 
which  is  the  disgrace  of  current  politics,  was 
practically  unknown.  The  men  who  repre 
sented  the  Southern  people  in  Washington 
came  from  the  people,  and  not  from  a  ring. 
Northern  writers  who  have  ascribed  the  firm 
control  in  Congress  of  the  national  govern 
ment  which  the  South  held  so  long  to  the  supe 
rior  character,  ability,  and  experience  of  its 
representatives,  do  not  seem  to  be  aware  that 
the  choice  of  such  representatives  and  their 
prolonged  tenure  show  that  in  politics,  at  least, 
the  education  of  the  Southerner  had  not  been 


THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH  31 

neglected.  The  rank  and  file  then  were  not 
swayed  simply  by  blind  passion  or  duped  by 
the  representations  of  political  gamesters. 
Nor  did  the  lump  need  the  leavening  of  the 
large  percentage  of  men  of  the  upper  classes 
who  served  as  privates,  some  of  them  from  the 
beginning  to  the  end  of  the  war.  The  rank 
and  file  were,  to  begin  with,  in  full  accord  with 
the  great  principles  of  the  war,  and  were  sus 
tained  by  the  abiding  conviction  of  the  justice 
of  the  cause.  Of  course,  there  were  in  the 
Southern  army,  as  in  every  army,  many  who 
went  with  the  multitude  in  the  first  enthusiastic 
rush,  or  who  were  brought  into  the  ranks  by 
the  needful  process  of  conscription;  but  it  is 
not  a  little  remarkable  that  few  of  the  poorest 
and  the  most  ignorant  could  be  induced  to  for 
swear  the  cause  and  to  purchase  release  from 
the  sufferings  of  imprisonment  by  the  simple 
process  of  taking  the  oath.  Those  who  have 
seen  the  light  of  battle  on  the  faces  of  these 
humble  sons  of  the  South,  or  witnessed  their 
steadfastness  in  camp,  on  the  march,  in  the 
hospital,  have  not  been  ashamed  of  the 
brotherhood. 


33  THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH 

There  is  such  a  thing  as  fighting  for  a  prin 
ciple,  an  idea ;  but  principle  and  idea  must  be 
incarnate,  and  the  principle  of  States'  rights 
was  incarnate  in  the  historical  life  of  the  South 
ern  people.  Of  the  thirteen  original  States, 
Virginia,  North  Carolina,  South  Carolina,  and 
Georgia  were  openly  and  officially  upon  the 
side  of  the  South.  Maryland  as  a  State  was 
bound  hand  and  foot.  We  counted  her  as 
ours,  for  the  Potomac  and  Chesapeake  Bay 
united  as  well  as  divided.  Each  of  these  States 
had  a  history,  had  an  individuality.  Every  one 
was  something  more  than  a  certain  aggregate 
of  square  miles  wherein  dwelt  an  uncertain 
number  of  uncertain  inhabitants,  something 
more  than  a  Territory  transformed  into  a 
State  by  the  magic  of  political  legerdemain ;  a 
creature  of  the  central  government,  and  duly 
loyal  to  its  creator. 

In  claiming  this  individuality,  nothing 
more  is  claimed  for  Virginia  and  for  South 
Carolina  than  would  be  conceded  to  Massa 
chusetts  and  Connecticut;  and  we  believed  then 
that  Massachusetts  and  Connecticut  would 


THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH  33 

not  have  behaved  otherwise  than  we  did,  if  the 
parts  had  been  reversed.  The  brandished 
sword  would  have  shown  what  manner  of  pla- 
cida  quies  Massachusetts  would  have  ensued, 
if  demands  had  been  made  on  her  at  all  com 
mensurate  with  the  Federal  demands  on  Vir 
ginia.  These  older  Southern  States  were 
proud  of  their  history,  and  they  showed  their 
pride  by  girding  at  their  neighbors.  South 
Carolina  had  her  fling  at  Georgia,  her  fling  at 
North  Carolina;  and  the  wish  that  the  little 
State  had  been  scuttled  at  an  early  day  was  a 
plagiarism  from  classical  literature  that  might 
have  emanated  from  the  South  as  well  as  from 
the  North.  Virginia  assumed  a  superiority 
that  was  resented  by  her  Southern  sisters  as 
well  as  by  her  Northern  partners.  The  Old 
North  State  derided  the  pretensions  of  the 
commonwealths  that  flanked  her  on  either  side, 
and  Georgia  was  not  slow  to  give  South  Caro 
lina  as  good  as  she  sent.  All  this  seemed  to 
be  harmless  banter,  but  the  rivalry  was  old 
enough  and  strong  enough  to  encourage  the 
hopes  of  the  Union  leaders  that  the  Confeder- 


34  THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH 

acy  would  split  along  state  lines.  The  cohesive 
power  of  the  Revolutionary  war  was  not  suffi 
ciently  strong  to  make  the  States  sink  their  con 
tributions  to  the  common  cause  in  the  common 
glory.  Washington  was  the  one  national 
hero,  and  yet  the  Washington  Light  Infantry 
of  Charleston  was  named,  not  after  the  illus 
trious  George,  but  after  his  kinsman,  William. 
The  story  of  Lexington  and  Concord  and 
Bunker  Hill  did  not  thrill  the  South  Caro 
linian  of  an  earlier  day,  and  those  great 
achievements  were  actually  criticized.  Who 
were  Putnam  and  Stark  that  South  Carolin 
ians  should  worship  them,  when  they  had  a 
Marion  and  a  Sumter  of  their  own  ?  Vermont 
went  wild,  the  other  day,  over  Bennington  as 
she  did  not  over  the  centenary  of  the  surrender 
at  Yorktown.  Take  away  this  local  patriot 
ism  and  you  take  out  all  the  color  that  is  left  in 
American  life.  That  the  local  patriotism  may 
not  only  consist  with  a  wider  patriotism,  but 
may  serve  as  a  most  important  element  in 
wider  patriotism,  is  true.  Witness  the  strong 
local  life  in  the  old  provinces  of  France.  No 


THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH  35 

student  of  history,  no  painter  of  manners,  can 
neglect  it.  In  Gerfaut,  a  novel  written  before 
the  Franco-Prussian  war,  Charles  de  Bernard 
represents  an  Alsatian  shepherd  as  saying,  "  I 
am  not  French;  I  am  Alsatian," — "trait  de 
patriotisme  de  docker  assez  commun  dans  la 
belle  province  du  Rhin"  adds  the  author,  little 
dreaming  of  the  national  significance  of  that 
"  patriotisme  de  clocher."  The  Breton's  love 
of  his  home  is  familiar  to  every  one  who  has 
read  his  Renan,  and  Blanche  Willis  Howard, 
in  Guenn,  makes  her  priest  exclaim,  "  Mon 
sieur,  I  would  fight  with  France  against  any 
other  nation,  but  I  would  fight  with  Brittany 
against  France.  I  love  France.  I  am  a 
Frenchman.  But  first  of  all  I  am  a  Breton." 
The  Provencal  speaks  of  France  as  if  she  were 
a  foreign  country,  and  fights  for  her  as  if  she 
were  his  alone.  What  is  true  of  France  is 
true  in  a  measure  of  England.  Devonshire 
men  are  notoriously  Devonshire  men  first  and 
last.  If  this  is  true  of  what  have  become  in 
tegral  parts  of  kingdom  or  republic  by  cen 
turies  of  incorporation,  what  is  to  be  said  of 


36  THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH 

the  States  that  had  never  renounced  their 
sovereignty,  that  had  only  suspended  it  in  part? 
The  example  of  state  pride  set  by  the  older 
States  was  not  lost  on  the  younger  Southern 
States,  and  the  Alabamian  and  the  Mississip- 
pian  lived  in  the  same  faith  as  did  the  stock 
from  which  they  sprang;  and  the  community 
of  views,  of  interest,  of  social  order,  soon 
made  a  larger  unit  and  prepared  the  way  for 
a  true  nationality,  and  with  the  nationality  a 
great  conflict.  The  heterogeneousness  of  the 
elements  that  made  up  the  Confederacy  did 
not  prove  the  great  source  of  weakness  that 
was  expected.  The  Border  States  looked  on 
the  world  with  different  eyes  from  the  Gulf 
States.  The  Virginia  farmer  and  the  Creole 
planter  of  Louisiana  were  of  different  strains; 
and  yet  there  was  a  solidarity  that  has  never 
failed  to  surprise  the  few  Northerners  who 
penetrated  the  South  for  study  and  pleasure. 
There  was  an  extraordinary  ramification  of 
family  and  social  ties  throughout  the  Southern 
States,  and  a  few  minutes'  conversation  suf 
ficed  to  place  any  member  of  the  social  organ- 


THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH  37 

ism  from  Virginia  to  Texas.  Great  schools, 
like  the  University  of  Virginia,  within  the 
Southern  border  did  much  to  foster  the  com 
munity  of  feeling,  and  while  there  were  not  a 
few  Southerners  at  Harvard  and  Yale,  and 
while  Princeton  was  almost  a  Southern  col 
lege,  an  education  in  the  North  did  not  seem 
to  nationalize  the  Southerner.  On  the  con 
trary,  as  in  the  universities  of  the  Middle 
Ages,  groups  were  formed  in  accordance  with 
nativity;  and  sectional  lines,  though  effaced  at 
certain  points,  were  strengthened  at  others. 
There  may  have  been  a  certain  broadening  of 
view ;  there  was  no  weakening  of  the  home  ties. 
West  Point  made  fewer  converts  to  this  side 
and  to  that  than  did  the  Northern  wives  of 
Southern  husbands,  the  Southern  wives  of 
Northern  husbands. 

All  this  is  doubtless  controvertible,  and 
what  has  been  written  may  serve  only  to 
amuse  or  to  disgust  those  who  are  better 
versed  in  the  facts  of  our  history  and  keener 
analysts  of  its  laws.  All  that  I  vouch  for  is 
the  feeling;  the  only  point  that  I  have  tried  to 


38  THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH 

make  is  the  simple  fact  that,  right  or  wrong, 
we  were  fully  persuaded  in  our  own  minds, 
and  that  there  was  no  lurking  suspicion  of  any 
moral  weakness  in  our  cause.  Nothing  could 
be  holier  than  the  cause,  nothing  more  impera 
tive  than  the  duty  of  upholding  it.  There 
were  those  in  the  South  who,  when  they  saw 
the  issue  of  the  war,  gave  up  their  faith  in 
God,  but  not  their  faith  in  the  cause. 

It  is  perfectly  possible  to  be  fully  persuaded 
in  one's  own  mind  without  the  passionate 
desire  to  make  converts  that  animates  the  born 
preacher,  and  any  one  may  be  excused  from 
preaching  when  he  recognizes  the  existence  of 
a  mental  or  moral  color-blindness  with  which 
it  is  not  worth  while  to  argue.  There  is  no 
umpire  to  decide  which  of  the  disputants  is 
color-blind,  and  the  discussion  is  apt  to  degen 
erate  into  a  wearisome  reiteration  of  points 
which  neither  party  will  concede.  Now  this 
matter  of  allegiance  is  just  such  a  question. 
Open  the  October  number  of  The  Atlantic 
and  read  the  sketch  of  General  Thomas,  whom 
many  military  men  on  the  Southern  side  con- 


THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH  39 

sider  to  have  been  the  ablest  of  all  the  Fed 
eral  generals.  He  was,  as  every  one  knows,  a 
Virginian,  and  it  seemed  to  us  that  his  being  a 
Virginian  was  remembered  against  him  in  the 
Federal  councils.  "  His  severance,"  says  the 
writer  in  The  Atlantic,  "  from  family  and 
State  was  a  keen  trial,  but '  his  duty  was  clear 
from  the  beginning/  To  his  vision  there 
was  but  one  country, — the  United  States  of 
America.  He  had  few  or  no  friends  at  the 
North.  Its  political  policy  had  not  seemed  to 
him  to  be  wise.  But  he  could  serve  under  no 
flag  except  that  which  he  had  pledged  his 
honor  to  uphold."  Passing  over  the  quiet 
assumption  that  the  North  was  the  United 
States  of  America,  which  sufficiently  character 
izes  the  view  of  the  writer,  let  us  turn  to  the 
contrast  which  would  at  once  have  suggested 
itself  even  if  it  had  not  been  brought  forward 
by  the  eulogist  of  Thomas.  A  greater  than 
Thomas  decided  the  question  at  the  same  time, 
and  decided  it  the  other  way.  To  Lee's  vision 
there  was  but  one  course  open  to  a  Virginian, 
and  the  pledge  that  he  had  given  when  Vir- 


40  THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH 

ginia  was  one  of  the  United  States  of  America 
had  ceased  to  bind  him  when  Virginia  with 
drew  from  the  compact.  His  duty  was  clear 
from  the  hour  when  to  remain  in  the  army 
would  have  been  to  draw  his  sword  against  a 
people  to  whom  he  was  "  indissolubly  bound." 
These  contrasted  cases  are  indeed  conve 
nient  tests  for  color-blindness.  There  may 
"  arise  a  generation  in  Virginia/'  or  even  a 
generation  of  Virginians,  "  who  will  learn  and 
confess  "  that  "  Thomas  loved  Virginia  as 
well  as  the  sons  she  has  preferred  to  honor, 
and  served  her  better."  But  no  representative 
Virginian  shares  that  prophetic  vision;  the 
color-blindness,  on  whichever  side  it  is,  has 
not  yielded  to  treatment  during  the  twenty- 
five  years  that  have  elapsed  since  the  close  of 
the  war,  and  may  as  well  be  accepted  for  an 
indefinite  period.  When  social  relations  were 
resumed  between  the  North  and  the  South, — 
they  followed  slowly  the  resumption  of  busi 
ness  relations, — what  we  should  call  the  color 
blindness  of  the  other  side  often  manifested 
itself  in  a  delicate  reticence  on  the  part  of  our 


THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH  41 

Northern  friends;  and  as  the  war  had  by 
no  means  constituted  their  lives  as  it  had 
constituted  ours  for  four  long  years,  the 
success  in  avoiding  the  disagreeable  topic 
would  have  been  considerable,  if  it  had  not 
been  for  awkward  allusions  on  the  part  of  the 
Southerners,  who,  having  been  shut  out  for  all 
that  time  from  the  study  of  literature  and  art 
and  other  elegant  and  uncompromising  sub 
jects,  could  hardly  keep  from  speaking  of  this 
and  that  incident  of  the  war.  Whereupon  a 
discreet,  or  rather  an  embarrassed  silence,  as 
if  a  pardoned  convict  had  playfully  referred  to 
the  arson  or  burglary,  not  to  say  worse,  that 
had  been  the  cause  of  his  seclusion. 

Some  fifteen  years  ago  Mr.  Lowell  was 
lecturing  in  Baltimore,  and  during  the  month 
of  his  stay  I  learned  to  know  the  charm  of  his 
manner  and  the  delight  of  his  conversation. 
If  I  had  been  even  more  prejudiced  than  I  was, 
I  could  not  have  withstood  that  easy  grace, 
that  winning  cordiality.  Every  one  knew 
where  he  had  stood  during  the  war,  and  how 
he  had  wielded  the  flail  of  his  "  lashing  hail  " 


42  THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH 

against  the  South  and  the  Southern  cause  and 
"  Southern  sympathizers."  But  that  warfare 
was  over  for  him,  and  out  of  kindly  regard  for 
my  feelings  he  made  no  allusion  to  the  great 
quarrel,  with  two  exceptions.  Once,  just  be 
fore  he  left  Baltimore,  he  was  talking  as  no 
other  man  could  talk  about  the  Yankee  dialect, 
and  turning  to  me  he  said  with  a  half  smile 
and  a  deep  twinkle  in  his  eye,  "  I  should  like 
to  have  you  read  what  I  have  written  about 
the  Yankee  dialect,  but  I  am  afraid  you  might 
not  like  the  context."  A  few  days  afterwards 
I  received  from  him  the  well-known  preface 
to  the  Second  Series  of  The  Biglow  Papers, 
cut  out  from  the  volume.  It  was  a  graceful 
concession  to  Southern  weakness,  and  after  all 
I  may  have  been  mistaken  in  thinking  that  I 
could  read  the  Second  Series  as  literature,  just 
as  I  should  read  the  Anti-Jacobin  or  the  Two 
penny  Post  Bag.  In  fact,  on  looking  into  the 
Second  Series  again,  I  must  confess  that  I  can 
not  even  now  discover  the  same  merits  that  I 
could  not  help  acknowledging  in  the  First 
Series,  which  I  read  for  the  first  time  in  1850, 


THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH  43 

when  I  was  a  student  in  Berlin.  By  that  time 
I  had  recovered  from  my  boyish  enthusiasm 
over  the  Mexican  war,  and  as  my  party  had 
been  successful,  I  could  afford  to  enjoy  the  wit 
and  humor  of  the  book,  from  the  inimitable 
Notices  of  an  Independent  Press  to  the  last 
utterance  of  Birdofredum  Sawin;  and  I  have 
always  remembered  enough  of  the  contents  to 
make  a  psychological  study  of  the  Second 
Series  a  matter  of  interest,  if  it  were  not  for 
other  things. 

On  the  second  occasion  we  were  passing 
together  under  the  shadow  of  the  Washington 
Monument,  and  the  name  of  Lee  came  by 
some  chance  into  the  current  of  talk.  Here 
Mr.  Lowell  could  not  refrain  from  expressing 
his  view  of  Lee's  course  in  turning  against  the 
government  to  which  he  had  sworn  allegiance. 
Doubtless  he  felt  it  to  be  his  duty  to  emphasize 
his  conviction  as  to  a  vital  clause  of  his  creed, 
but  it  instantly  became  evident  that  this  was  a 
theme  that  could  not  be  profitably  pursued, 
and  we  walked  in  silence  the  rest  of  the  way, — 
the  author  of  the  line 

Virginia  gave  us  this  imperial  man, 


44  THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH 

and  the  follower  of  that  other  imperial  man 
Virginia  gave  the  world;  both  honest,  each 
believing  the  other  hopelessly  wrong,  but  abso 
lutely  sincere. 

Scant  allusion  has  been  made  in  this  paper 
to  the  subject  of  slavery,  which  bulks  so  large 
in  almost  every  study  of  the  war.  A  similar 
scantiness  of  allusion  to  slavery  is  noticeable 
in  the  Memorial  volume,  to  which  I  have 
already  referred;  a  volume  which  was  pre 
pared,  not  to  produce  an  impression  on  the 
Northern  mind,  but  to  indulge  a  natural  desire 
to  honor  the  fallen  soldiers  of  the  Confeder 
acy;  a  book  written  by  friends  for  friends. 
The  rights  of  the  State  and  the  defence  of  the 
country  are  mentioned  at  every  turn;  "the 
peculiar  institution  "  is  merely  touched  on  here 
and  there,  except  in  one  passage  in  which  a 
Virginian  speaker  maintains  that  as  a  matter 
of  dollars  and  cents  it  would  be  better  for  Vir 
ginia  to  give  up  her  slaves  than  to  set  up  a  sepa 
rate  government,  with  all  the  cost  of  a  stand 
ing  army  which  the  conservation  of  slavery 
would  make  necessary.  This  silence,  which 


THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH  45 

might  be  misunderstood,  is  plain  enough  to  a 
Southern  man.  Slavery  was  simply  a  test  case, 
and  except  as  a  test  case  it  is  too  complicated 
a  question  to  be  dealt  with  at  the  close  of  a 
paper  which  is  already  too  long.  Except  as  a 
test  case  it  is  impossible  to  speak  of  the  South 
ern  view  of  the  institution,  for  we  were  not  all 
of  the  same  mind. 

There  were  theorists  who  maintained  that  a 
society  based  on  the  rock  of  slavery  was  the 
best  possible  in  a  world  where  there  must  be  a 
lowest  order;  and  the  doctrine  of  the  "  mud 
sill  "  as  propounded  by  a  leading  thinker  of 
this  school  evoked  mud  volcanoes  all  over  the 
North.  Scriptural  arguments  in  defence  of 
slavery  formed  a  large  part  of  the  literature 
of  the  subject,  and  the  hands  of  Southern 
clergymen  were  upheld  by  their  conservative 
brothers  beyond  the  border. 

Some  who  had  read  the  signs  of  the  times 
otherwise  knew  that  slavery  was  doomed  by 
the  voice  of  the  world,  and  that  no  theory  of 
society  could  withstand  the  advance  of  the 
new  spirit;  and  if  the  secrets  of  all  hearts 


46  THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH 

could  have  been  revealed,  our  enemies  would 
have  been  astounded  to  see  how  many  thou 
sands  and  tens  of  thousands  in  the  Southern 
States  felt  the  crushing  burden  and  the  awful 
responsibility  of  the  institution  which  we  were 
supposed  to  be  defending  with  the  melodra 
matic  fury  of  pirate  kings.  We  were  born  to 
this  social  order,  we  had  to  do  our  duty  in  it 
according  to  our  lights,  and  this  duty  was 
made  indefinitely  more  difficult  by  the  inter 
ference  of  those  who,  as  we  thought,  could  not 
understand  the  conditions  of  the  problem,  and 
who  did  not  have  to  bear  the  expense  of  the 
experiments  they  proposed. 

There  were  the  practical  men  who  saw  in 
the  negro  slave  an  efficient  laborer  in  a  certain 
line  of  work,  and  there  were  the  practical  men 
who  doubted  the  economic  value  of  our  system 
as  compared  with  that  of  the  free  States,  and 
whom  the  other  practical  men  laughed  to 
scorn. 

There  was  the  small  and  eminently  respect 
able  body  of  benevolent  men  who  promoted 
the  scheme  of  African  colonization,  of  which 


THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH  47 

great  things  were  expected  in  my  boyhood. 
The  manifest  destiny  of  slavery  in  America 
was  the  regeneration  of  Africa. 

The  people  at  large  had  no  theory,  and  the 
practice  varied  as  much  in  the  relation  of 
master  and  servant  as  it  varied  in  other  family 
relations.  Too  much  tragedy  and  too  much 
idyl  have  been  imported  into  the  home  life  of 
the  Southern  people ;  but  this  is  not  the  place 
to  reduce  poetry  to  prose. 

On  one  point,  however,  all  parties  in  the 
South  were  agreed,  and  the  vast  majority  of 
the  people  of  the  North — before  the  war. 
The  abolitionist  proper  was  considered  not 
so  much  the  friend  of  the  negro  as  the  enemy 
of  society.  As  the  war  went  on,  and  the  aboli 
tionist  saw  the  "  glory  of  the  Lord  "  revealed 
in  a  way  he  had  never  hoped  for,  he  saw  at  the 
same  time,  or  rather  ought  to  have  seen,  that 
the  order  he  had  lived  to  destroy  could  not 
have  been  a  system  of  hellish  wrong  and  fiend 
ish  cruelty;  else  the  prophetic  vision  of  the 
liberators  would  have  been  fulfilled,  and  the 
horrors  of  San  Domingo  would  have  polluted 


48  THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH 

this  fair  land.  For  the  negro  race  does  not 
deserve  undivided  praise  for  its  conduct  dur 
ing  the  war.  Let  some  small  part  of  the  credit 
be  given  to  the  masters,  not  all  to  the  finer 
qualities  of  their  "  brothers  in  black."  The 
school  in  which  the  training  was  given  is 
closed,  and  who  wishes  to  open  it?  Its  meth 
ods  were  old-fashioned  and  were  sadly  behind 
the  times,  but  the  old  schoolmasters  turned 
out  scholars  who,  in  certain  branches  of  moral 
philosophy,  were  not  inferior  to  the  graduates 
of  the  new  university. 

I  have  tried  in  this  paper  to  reproduce  the 
past  and  its  perspective,  to  show  how  the  men 
of  my  time  and  of  my  environment  looked  at 
the  problems  that  confronted  us.  It  has  been 
a  painful  and,  I  fear,  a  futile  task.  So  far  as 
I  have  reproduced  the  perspective  for  myself 
it  has  been  a  revival  of  sorrows  such  as  this 
generation  cannot  understand;  it  has  recalled 
the  hours  when  it  gave  one  a  passion  for  death, 
a  shame  of  life,  to  read  our  bulletins.  And 
how  could  I  hope  to  reproduce  that  perspec 
tive  for  others,  for  men  who  belong  to  another 


THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH  49 

generation  and  another  region,  when  so  many 
men  who  lived  the  same  life  and  fought  on 
the  same  side  have  themselves  lost  the  point  of 
view  not  only  of  the  beginning  of  the  war,  but 
also  of  the  end  of  the  war,  not  only  of  the 
inexpressible  exaltation,  but  of  the  unutter 
able  degradation  ?  They  have  forgotten  what 
a  strange  world  the  survivors  of  the  conflict 
had  to  face.  If  the  State  had  been  ours  still, 
the  foundations  of  the  earth  would  not  have 
been  out  of  course ;  but  the  State  was  a  military 
district,  and  the  Confederacy  had  ceased  to 
exist.  The  generous  policy  which  would  have 
restored  the  State  and  made  a  new  union  pos 
sible,  which  would  have  disentwined  much  of 
the  passionate  clinging  to  the  past,  was  crossed 
by  the  death  of  the  only  man  who  could  have 
carried  it  through,  if  even  he  could  have  car 
ried  it  through;  and  years  of  trouble  had  to 
pass  before  the  current  of  national  life  ran 
freely  through  the  Southern  States.  It  was 
before  this  circuit  was  complete  that  the  prin 
cipal  of  one  of  the  chief  schools  of  Virginia 
set  up  a  tablet  to  the  memory  of  the  "  old 


50  THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH 

boys  "  who  had  perished  in  the  war, — it  was 
a  list  the  length  of  which  few  Northern  col 
leges  could  equal, — and  I  was  asked  to  fur 
nish  a  motto.  Those  who  know  classic  liter 
ature  at  all  know  that  for  patriotism  and 
friendship  mottoes  are  not  far  to  seek,  but 
during  the  war  I  felt  as  I  had  never  felt  before 
the  meaning  of  many  a  classic  sentence.  The 
motto  came  from  Ovid,  whom  many  call  a 
frivolous  poet;  but  the  frivolous  Roman  was 
after  all  a  Roman,  and  he  was  young  when  he 
wrote  the  line, — too  young  not  to  feel  the 
generous  swell  of  true  feeling.  It  was  written 
of  the  dead  brothers  of  Briseis : — 

Qui  bene  pro  patria  cum  patriaque  iacent. 

The  sentiment  found  an  echo  at  the  time,  de 
served  an  echo  at  the  time.  Now  it  is  a  senti 
ment  without  an  echo,  and  last  year  a  valued 
personal  friend  of  mine,  in  an  eloquent  ora 
tion,  a  noble  tribute  to  the  memory  of  our 
great  captain,  a  discourse  full  of  the  glory  of 
the  past,  the  wisdom  of  the  present,  the  hope 


THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH  51 

of  the  future,  rebuked  the  sentiment  as  idle 
in  its  despair.  As  well  rebuke  a  cry  of  anguish, 
a  cry  of  desolation  out  of  the  past.  For  those 
whose  names  are  recorded  on  that  tablet  the 
line  is  but  too  true.  For  those  of  us  who  sur 
vive  it  has  ceased  to  have  the  import  that  it 
once  had,  for  we  have  learned  to  work  reso 
lutely  for  the  furtherance  of  all  that  is  good  in 
the  wider  life  that  has  been  opened  to  us  by 
the  issue  of  the  war,  without  complaining, 
without  repining.  That  the  cause  we  fought 
for  and  our  brothers  died  for  was  the  cause 
of  civil  liberty,  and  not  the  cause  of  human 
slavery,  is  a  thesis  which  we  feel  ourselves 
bound  to  maintain  whenever  our  motives  are 
challenged  or  misunderstood,  if  only  for  our 
children's  sake.  But  even  that  will  not  long 
be  necessary,  for  the  vindication  of  our  prin 
ciples  will  be  made  manifest  in  the  working 
out  of  the  problems  with  which  the  republic 
has  to  grapple.  If,  however,  the  effacement 
of  state  lines  and  the  complete  centralization 
of  the  government  shall  prove  to  be  the  wis- 


52  THE  CREED  OF  THE  OLD  SOUTH 

dom  of  the  future,  the  poetry  of  life  will  still 
find  its  home  in  the  old  order,  and  those  who 
loved  their  State  best  will  live  longest  in  song 
and  legend, — song  yet  unsung,  legend  not  yet 
crystallized. 


A  SOUTHERNER  IN  THE 
PELOPONNESIAN  WAR 


A  SOUTHERNER  IN  THE  PELOPON- 

NESIAN  WAR 

I 

I  had  intended  to  call  this  study  Two  Wars, 
but  I  was  afraid  lest  I  should  be  under  the 
domination  of  the  title,  and  an  elaborate  com 
parison  of  the  Peloponnesian  War  and  the 
War  between  the  States  would  undoubtedly 
have  led  to  no  little  sophistication  of  the  facts. 
Historical  parallel  bars  are  usually  set  up  for 
exhibiting  feats  of  mental  agility.  The  mental 
agility  is  often  moral  suppleness,  and  nobody 
expects  a  critical  examination  of  the  parallel 
ism  itself.  He  was  not  an  historian  of  the 
first  rank,  but  a  phrase-making  rhetorician, 
who  is  responsible  for  the  current  saying, 
History  is  philosophy  teaching  by  examples. 
This  definition  is  about  as  valuable  as  some  of 
those  other  definitions  that  express  one  art  in 
terms  of  another:  poetry  in  terms  of  painting, 


56  TWO  WARS 


and  painting  in  terms  of  poetry.  "  Archi 
tecture  is  frozen  music  "  does  not  enable  us  to 
understand  either  perpendicular  Gothic  or  a 
fugue  of  Bach;  and  when  an  historian  defines 
history  in  terms  of  philosophy,  or  a  philoso 
pher  philosophy  in  terms  of  history,  you  may 
be  on  the  lookout  for  sophistication.  Your 
philosophical  historian  points  his  moral  by 
adorning  his  tale.  Your  historical  philosopher 
allows  no  zigzags  in  the  march  of  his  evolu 
tion. 

In  like  manner,  the  attempt  to  express  one 
war  in  terms  of  another  is  apt  to  lead  to  a 
wresting  of  facts.  No  two  wars  are  as  like  as 
two  peas.  Yet  as  any  two  marriages  in  society 
will  yield  a  certain  number  of  resemblances,  so 
will  any  two  wars  in  history,  whether  war 
itself  be  regarded  as  abstract  or  concrete, — a 
question  that  seems  to  have  exercised  some 
grammatical  minds,  and  ought  therefore  to  be 
settled  before  any  further  step  is  taken  in  this 
disquisition,  which  is  the  disquisition  of  a 
grammarian.  Now  most  persons  would  pro 
nounce  war  an  abstract,  but  one  excellent 


TWO  WARS  57 


manual  with  which  I  am  acquainted  sets  it 
down  as  a  concrete,  and  I  have  often  thought 
that  the  author  must  have  known  something 
practically  about  war.  At  all  events,  to  those 
who  have  seen  the  midday  sun  darkened  by 
burning  homesteads,  and  wheatfields  illumi 
nated  by  stark  forms  in  blue  and  gray,  war  is 
sufficiently  concrete.  The  very  first  dead 
soldier  one  sees,  enemy  or  friend,  takes  war 
forever  out  of  the  category  of  abstracts. 

When  I  was  a  student  abroad,  American 
novices  used  to  be  asked  in  jest,  "  Is  this  your 
first  ruin  ?  "  "  Is  this  your  first  nightingale  ?  " 
I  am  not  certain  that  I  can  place  my  first  ruin 
or  my  first  nightingale,  but  I  can  recall  my  first 
dead  man  on  the  battlefield.  We  were  mak 
ing  an  advance  on  the  enemy's  position  near 
Huttonsville.  Nothing,  by  the  way,  could 
have  been  more  beautiful  than  the  plan,  which 
I  was  privileged  to  see ;  and  as  we  neared  the 
objective  point,  it  was  a  pleasure  to  watch  how 
column  after  column,  marching  by  this  road 
and  that,  converged  to  the  rendezvous.  It 
was  as  if  some  huge  spider  were  gathering  its 


58  TWO  WARS 


legs  about  the  victim.  The  special  order  issued 
breathed  a  spirit  of  calm  resolution  worthy  of 
the  general  commanding  and  his  troops.  No 
body  that  I  remember  criticised  the  tautologi 
cal  expression,  "  The  progress  of  this  army 
must  be  forward."  We  were  prepared  for  a 
hard  fight,  for  we  knew  that  the  enemy  was 
strongly  posted.  Most  of  us  were  to  be  under 
fire  for  the  first  time,  and  there  was  some  talk 
about  the  chances  of  the  morrow  as  we  lay 
down  to  sleep.  Moralizing  of  that  sort  gets 
less  and  less  common  with  experience  in  the 
business,  and  this  time  the  moralizing  may 
have  seemed  to  some  premature.  But  wher 
ever  the  minie  ball  sang  its  diabolical  mosquito 
song  there  was  death  in  the  air,  and  I  was  soon 
to  see  brought  into  camp,  under  a  flag  of  truce, 
the  lifeless  body  of  the  heir  of  Mount  Vernon, 
whose  graceful  riding  I  had  envied  a  few  days 
before.  However,  there  was  no  serious  fight 
ing.  The  advance  on  the  enemy's  position 
had  developed  more  strength  in  front  than 
we  had  counted  on,  or  some  of  the  spider's  legs 
had  failed  to  close  in.  A  misleading  report 


TWO  WARS  59 


had  been  brought  to  headquarters.  A  weak 
point  in  the  enemy's  line  had  been  reinforced. 
Who  knows?  The  best  laid  plans  are  often 
thwarted  by  the  merest  trifles, — an  insignifi 
cant  puddle,  a  jingling  canteen.  This  game  of 
war  is  a  hit  or  miss  game,  after  all.  A  certain 
fatalism  is  bred  thereby,  and  it  is  well  to  set 
out  with  a  stock  of  that  article.  So  our  reso 
lute  advance  became  a  forced  reconnaissance, 
greatly  to  the  chagrin  of  the  younger  and  more 
ardent  spirits.  We  found  out  exactly  where 
the  enemy  was,  and  declined  to  have  anything 
further  to  do  with  him  for  the  time  being. 
But  in  finding  him  we  had  to  clear  the  ground 
and  drive  in  the  pickets.  One  picket  had  been 
posted  at  the  end  of  a  loop  in  a  chain  of  valleys. 
The  road  we  followed  skirted  the  base  of  one 
range  of  hills.  The  house  which  served  as  the 
headquarters  of  the  picket  was  on  the  other 
side.  A  meadow  as  level  as  a  board  stretched 
between.  I  remember  seeing  a  boy  come  out 
and  catch  a  horse,  while  we  were  advancing. 
Somehow  it  seemed  to  be  a  trivial  thing  to  do 
just  then.  I  knew  better  afterwards.  Our 


60  TWO  WARS 


skirmishers  had  done  their  work,  had  swept 
the  woods  on  either  side  clean,  and  the  pickets 
had  fallen  back  on  the  main  body;  but  not  all 
of  them.  One  man,  if  not  more,  had  only  had 
time  to  fall  dead.  The  one  I  saw,  the  first,  was 
a  young  man,  not  thirty,  I  should  judge,  lying 
on  his  back,  his  head  too  low  for  comfort.  He 
had  been  killed  outright,  and  there  was  no  dis 
tortion  of  feature.  No  more  peaceful  faces 
than  one  sees  at  times  on  the  battlefield,  and 
sudden  death,  despite  the  Litany,  is  not  the 
least  enviable  exit.  In  this  case  there  was 
something  like  a  mild  surprise  on  the  counte 
nance.  The  rather  stolid  face  could  never 
have  been  very  expressive.  An  unposted  let 
ter  was  found  on  the  dead  man's  body.  It  was 
written  in  German,  and  I  was  asked  to  inter 
pret  it,  in  case  it  should  contain  any  important 
information.  There  was  no  important  infor 
mation;  just  messages  to  friends  and  kindred, 
just  the  trivialities  of  camp  life. 

The  man  was  an  invader,  and  in  my  eyes 
deserved  an  invader's  doom.  If  sides  had 
been  changed,  he  would  have  been  a  rebel,  and 


TWO  WARS  61 


would  have  deserved  a  rebel's  doom.  I  was 
not  stirred  to  the  depths  by  the  sight,  but  it 
gave  me  a  lesson  in  grammar,  and  war  has  ever 
been  concrete  to  me  from  that  time  on.  The 
horror  I  did  not  feel  at  first  grew  steadily. 
"  A  sweet  thing,"  says  Pindar,  "  is  war  to 
those  that  have  not  tried  it." 

II 

Concrete  or  abstract,  there  are  general  re 
semblances  between  any  two  wars,  and  so  war 
lends  itself  readily  to  allegories.  Every  one 
has  read  Bunyan's  Holy  War.  Not  every 
one  has  read  Spangenberg's  Grammatical 
War.  It  is  an  ingenious  performance,  which 
fell  into  my  hands  many  years  after  I  had  gone 
forth  to  see  and  to  feel  what  war  was  like.  In 
Spangenberg's  Grammatical  War  the  nouns 
and  the  verbs  are  the  contending  parties. 
Poeta  is  king  of  the  nouns,  and  Amo  king  of 
the  verbs.  There  is  a  regular  debate  between 
the  two  sovereigns.  The  king  of  the  verbs 
summons  the  adverbs  to  his  help,  the  king  of 


62  TWO  WARS 


the  nouns  the  pronouns.  The  camps  are 
pitched,  the  forces  marshalled.  The  neutral 
power,  participle,  is  invoked  by  both  parties, 
but  declines  to  send  open  assistance  to  either, 
hoping  that  in  this  contest  between  noun  and 
verb  the  third  party  will  acquire  the  rule  over 
the  whole  territory  of  language.  After  a  final 
summons  on  the  part  of  the  king  of  the  verbs, 
and  a  fierce  response  from  the  rival  monarch, 
active  hostilities  begin.  We  read  of  raids  and 
forays.  Prisoners  are  treated  with  contumely, 
and  their  skirts  are  docked  as  in  the  Biblical 
narrative.  Treachery  adds  excitement  to  the 
situation.  Skirmishes  precede  the  great  en 
gagement,  in  which  the  nouns  are  worsted, 
though  they  have  come  off  with  some  of  the 
spoils  of  war;  and  peace  is  made  on  terms  dic 
tated  by  Priscian,  Servius,  and  Donatus. 
Spangenberg's  Grammatical  War  is  a  not  un 
interesting,  not  uninstructive  squib,  and  the 
salt  of  it,  or  saltpetre  of  it,  has  not  all  evapo 
rated  after  the  lapse  of  some  three  centuries. 
There  are  bits  that  remind  one  of  the  Greco- 
Turkish  war  of  a  few  weeks  ago. 


TWO  WARS  63 


But  there  is  no  military  science  in  Bunyan's 
Holy  War  nor  in  Spangenberg's  Grammatical 
War:  why  should  there  be?  Practical  war 
fare  is  rough  work.  To  frighten,  to  wound, 
to  kill, — these  three  abide  under  all  forms  of 
military  doctrine,  and  the  greatest  of  these  is 
frightening.  Ares,  the  god  of  war,  has  two 
satellites,  Terror  and  Affright.  Fear  is  the 
Gorgon's  head.  The  serpents  are  very  real, 
very  effective,  in  their  way,  but  logically  they 
are  unessential  tresses.  The  Gorgon  stares 
you  out  of  countenance,  and  that  suffices.  The 
object  is  the  removal  of  an  obstacle.  Killing 
and  wounding  are  but  means  to  an  end. 
Hand-to-hand  fighting  is  rare,  and  it  would  be 
easy  to  count  the  instances  in  which  cavalry 
meets  the  shock  of  cavalry.  Crossing  sabres 
is  not  a  common  pastime  in  the  red  game  of 
war.  It  makes  a  fine  picture,  to  be  sure,  the 
finer  for  the  rarity  of  the  thing  itself. 

To  frighten,  to  wound,  to  kill,  being  the 
essential  processes,  war  amounts  to  the  same 
thing  the  world  over,  world  of  time  and  world 
of  space.  Whether  death  or  disability  comes 


64  TWO  WARS 


by  Belgian  ball  or  Spencer  bullet,  by  the  stone 
of  a  Balearic  slinger,  by  a  bolt  from  a  cross^ 
bow,  is  a  matter  of  detail  which  need  not 
trouble  the  philosophic  mind,  and  the  ancients 
showed  their  sense  in  ascribing  fear  to  divine 
inspiration. 

If  the  processes  of  war  are  primitive,  the 
causes  of  war  are  no  less  so.  It  has  been  strik 
ingly  said  of  late  by  a  Scandinavian  scholar 
that  "  language  was  born  in  the  courting-days 
of  mankind:  the  first  utterance  of  speech 
<was>  something  between  the  nightly  love- 
lyrics  of  puss  upon  the  tiles  and  the  melo 
dious  love-songs  of  the  nightingale."  "  War, 
the  father  of  all  things,"  goes  back  to 
the  same  origin  as  language.  The  serenade 
is  matched  by  the  battle-cry.  The  fight  be 
tween  two  cock-pheasants  for  the  love  of  a 
hen-pheasant  is  war  in  its  last  analysis,  in  its 
primal  manifestation.  Selfish  hatred  is  at  the 
bottom  of  it.  It  is  the  hell-fire  to  which  we 
owe  the  heat  that  is  necessary  to  some  of  the 
noblest  as  to  some  of  the  vilest  manifesta 
tions  of  human  nature.  Righteous  indigna- 


TWO  WARS  65 


tion,  sense  of  injustice,  sympathy  with  the 
oppressed,  consecration  to  country,  fine  words 
all,  fine  things,  but  so  many  of  the  men  who 
represent  these  fine  things  perish.  It  wrings 
the  heart  at  a  distance  of  more  than  thirty 
years  to  think  of  those  who  have  fallen,  and 
love  still  maintains  passionately  that  they  were 
the  best.  At  any  rate,  they  were  among  the 
best,  and  both  sides  are  feeling  the  loss  to  this 
day,  not  only  in  the  men  themselves,  but  in  the 
sons  that  should  have  been  born  to  them. 

Any  two  wars,  then,  will  yield  a  sufficient 
number  of  resemblances,  in  killed,  wounded, 
and  missing,  in  the  elemental  matter  of  hatred, 
or,  if  you  choose  to  give  it  a  milder  name, 
rivalry.  These  things  are  of  the  essence  of 
war,  and  the  manifestations  run  parallel  even 
in  the  finer  lines.  One  cock-pheasant  finds  the 
drumming  of  another  cock-pheasant  a  very 
irritating  sound,  Chanticleer  objects  to  the 
note  of  Chanticleer,  and  the  more  articulate 
human  being  is  rasped  by  the  voice  of  his 
neighbor.  The  Attic  did  not  like  the  broad 
Boeotian  speech.  Parson  Evans's  "  seese  and 


66  TWO  WARS 


putter  "  were  the  bitterest  ingredients  in  Fal- 
staff's  dose  of  humiliation.  *  Yankee  twang  " 
and  "  Southern  drawl "  incited  as  well  as 
echoed  hostility. 

Borderers  are  seldom  friends,  "  An  Attic 
neighbor  "  is  a  Greek  proverb.  Kentucky  and 
Ohio  frown  at  each  other  across  the  river. 
Cincinnati  looks  down  on  Covington,  and  Cov- 
ington  glares  at  Cincinnati.  Aristophanes,  in 
his  mocking  way,  attributes  the  Peloponnesian 
war  to  a  kidnapping  affair  between  Athens 
and  Megara.  The  underground  railroad  pre 
ceded  the  aboveground  railroad  in  the  history 
of  the  great  American  conflict. 

There  were  jealousies  enough  between 
Athens  and  Sparta  in  the  olden  times,  which 
correspond  to  our  colonial  days,  and  in  the 
Persian  war,  which  was  in  a  sense  the  Greek 
war  of  independence.  In  like  manner  the 
chronicles  of  our  Revolutionary  period  show 
that  there  was  abundance  of  bad  blood  between 
Northern  colonies  and  Southern  colonies.  The 
Virginian  planter  whom  all  have  agreed  to 
make  the  one  national  hero  was  after  all  a 


TWO  WARS  67 


Virginian,  and  Virginians  have  not  forgotten 
the  impatient  utterances  of  the  "  imperial 
man  "  on  the  soil  of  Massachusetts  and  in  the 
streets  of  New  York.  Nobody  takes  Knicker 
bocker's  History  of  New  York  seriously,  as 
owlish  historians  are  wont  to  take  Aris 
tophanes.  Why  not?  We  accept  the  hostility 
of  Attica  and  Boeotia,  of  Attica  and  Megara; 
and  there  are  no  more  graphic  chapters  than 
those  which  set  forth  the  enmity  between  New 
York  and  Maryland,  between  New  Amster 
dam  and  Connecticut. 

Business  is  often  more  potent  than  blood. 
Nullification,  the  forerunner  of  disunion,  rose 
from  a  question  of  tariff.  The  echoes  had  not 
died  out  when  I  woke  to  conscious  life.  I 
knew  that  I  was  the  son  of  a  nullifier,  and  the 
nephew  of  a  Union  man.  It  was  whispered 
that  our  beloved  family  physician  found  it 
prudent  to  withdraw  from  the  public  gaze 
for  a  while,  and  that  my  uncle's  windows  were 
broken  by  the  palmettoes  of  a  nullification 
procession;  and  I  can  remember  from  my 
boyhood  days  how  unreconciled  citizens  of 


68  TWO  WARS 


Charleston  shook  their  fists  at  the  revenue 
cutter  and  its  "  foreign  flag."  Such  an  early 
experience  enables  one  to  understand  our  war 
better.  It  enables  one  to  understand  the  Pelo- 
ponnesian  war  better,  the  struggle  between  the 
union  of  which  Athens  was  the  mistress  and 
the  confederacy  of  which  Sparta  was  the  head. 
Non-intercourse  between  Athens  and  Megara 
was  the  first  stage.  The  famous  Megarian 
decree  of  Pericles,  which  closed  the  market  of 
Athens  to  Megarians,  gave  rise  to  angry  con 
troversy,  and  the  refusal  to  rescind  that  decree 
led  to  open  war.  But  Megara  was  little  more 
than  a  pretext.  The  subtle  influence  of  Corinth 
was  potent.  The  great  merchant  city  of 
Greece  dreaded  the  rise  of  Athens  to  dominant 
commercial  importance,  and  in  the  conflict  be 
tween  the  Corinthian  brass  and  the  Attic  clay, 
the  clay  was  shattered.  Corinth  does  not  show 
her  hand  much  in  the  Peloponnesian  war.  She 
figures  at  the  beginning,  and  then  disappears. 
But  the  old  mole  is  at  work  the  whole  time, 
and  what  the  Peloponnesians  called  the  Attic 
war,  and  the  Attics  the  Peloponnesian  war, 


TWO  WARS  69 


might  have  been  called  the  Corinthian  war. 
The  exchange,  the  banking-house,  were  impor 
tant  factors  then  as  now.  "  Sinews  of  war  " 
is  a  classical  expression.  The  popular  cry  of 
"  Persian  gold  "  was  heard  in  the  Pelopon- 
nesian  war  as  the  popular  cry  of  "  British 
gold  "  is  heard  now. 

True,  there  was  no  slavery  question  in  the 
Peloponnesian  war,  for  antique  civilization 
without  slavery  is  hardly  thinkable;  but  after 
all,  the  slavery  question  belongs  ultimately  to 
the  sphere  of  economics.  The  humanitarian 
spirit,  set  free  by  the  French  Revolution,  was 
at  work  in  the  Southern  States  as  in  the  North 
ern  States,  but  it  was  hampered  by  economic 
considerations.  Virginia,  as  every  one  knows, 
was  on  the  verge  of  becoming  a  free  State. 
Colonization  flourished  in  my  boyhood.  A 
friend  of  my  father's  left  him  trustee  for  his 
"  servants,"  as  we  called  them.  They  were 
quartered  opposite  our  house  in  Charleston, 
and  the  pickaninnies  were  objects  of  profound 
interest  to  the  children  of  the  neighborhood. 
One  or  two  letters  came  from  the  emigrants 


70  TWO  WARS 


after  they  reached  Liberia.    Then  silence  fell 
on  the  African  farm. 

Some  of  the  most  effective  anti-slavery  re 
formers  were  Charlestonians  by  birth  and 
breeding.  I  cannot  say  that  Grimke  was  a 
popular  name,  but  homage  was  paid  to  the 
talent  of  Frederick,  as  I  remember  only  too 
well,  for  I  had  to  learn  a  speech  of  his  by 
heart,  as  a  schoolboy  exercise.  But  the  eco 
nomic  conditions  of  the  South  were  not 
favorable  to  the  spread  of  the  ideas  repre 
sented  by  the  Grimkes.  The  slavery  question 
kept  alive  the  spirit  that  manifested  itself  in 
the  tariff  question.  State  rights  were  not  suf 
fered  to  slumber.  The  Southerner  resented 
Northern  dictation  as  Pericles  resented  Lace 
daemonian  dictation,  and  our  Peloponnesian 
war  began. 

Ill 

The  processes  of  the  two  wars,  then,  were 
the  same, — killing,  wounding,  frightening. 
The  causes  of  the  two  wars  resolved  them- 


TWO  WARS  71 


selves  into  the  elements  of  hatred.  The  de 
tails  of  the  two  wars  meet  at  many  points; 
only  one  must  be  on  one's  guard  against  merely 
fanciful,  merely  external  resemblances. 

In  1860  I  spent  a  few  days  in  Holland,  and 
among  my  various  excursions  in  that  fascinat 
ing  country  I  took  a  solitary  trip  on  a  treck- 
schuit  from  Amsterdam  to  Delft.  Holland 
was  so  true  to  Dutch  pictures  that  there  was  a 
retrospective  delight  in  the  houses  and  in  the 
people.  There  was  a  charm  in  the  very  signs, 
in  the  names  of  the  villas ;  for  my  knowledge 
of  Dutch  had  not  passed  beyond  the  stage  at 
which  the  Netherlandish  tongue  seems  to  be 
an  English-German  Dictionary,  disguised  in 
strong  waters.  But  the  thing  that  struck  me 
most  was  the  general  aspect  of  the  country. 
Everywhere  gates.  Nowhere  fences.  The 
gates  guarded  the  bridges  and  the  canals  were 
the  fences,  but  the  canals  and  the  low  bridges 
were  not  to  be  seen  at  a  distance,  and  the 
visual  effect  was  that  of  isolated  gates.  It  was 
an  absurd  landscape  even  after  the  brain  had 
made  the  necessary  corrections. 


72  TWO  WARS 


In  the  third  year  of  the  war  I  was  not  far 
from  Fredericksburg.  The  country  had  been 
stripped,  and  the  forlorn  region  was  a  sad  con 
trast  to  the  smug  prosperity  of  Holland.  And 
yet  of  a  sudden  the  Dutch  landscape  flashed 
upon  my  inward  eye,  for  Spottsylvania,  like 
Holland,  was  dotted  with  fenceless  gates.  The 
rails  of  the  inclosures  had  long  before  gone  to 
feed  bivouac  fires,  but  the  great  gates  were  too 
solidly  constructed  to  tempt  marauders.  It 
was  an  absurd  landscape,  an  absurd  parallel. 

Historical  parallels  are  often  no  better. 
When  one  compares  two  languages  of  the  same 
family,  the  first  impression  is  that  of  similarity. 
It  is  hard  for  the  novice  to  keep  his  Italian  and 
his  Spanish  apart.  The  later  and  more  abid 
ing  impression  is  that  of  dissimilarity.  A  total 
stranger  confounds  twins  in  whom  the  mem 
bers  of  the  household  find  but  vague  likeness. 
There  is  no  real  resemblance  between  the  two 
wars  we  are  contemplating  outside  the  inevi 
table  features  of  all  armed  conflicts,  and  we 
must  be  on  our  guard  against  the  sophistica 
tion  deprecated  in  the  beginning  of  this  study. 


TWO  WARS  73 


And  yet  one  coming  fresh  to  a  comparison  of 
the  Peloponnesian  war  and  the  war  between 
the  States  might  see  a  striking  similarity,  such 
as  I  saw  between  the  Dutch  landscape  and  the 
landscape  in  Spottsylvania. 

The  Peloponnesian  war,  like  our  war,  was 
a  war  between  two  leagues,  a  Northern  Union 
and  a  Southern  Confederacy.  The  Northern 
Union,  represented  by  Athens,  was  a  naval 
power.  The  Southern  Confederacy,  under 
the  leadership  of  Sparta,  was  a  land  power. 
The  Athenians  represented  the  progressive 
element,  the  Spartans  the  conservative.  The 
Athenians  believed  in  a  strong  centralized 
government.  The  Lacedaemonians  professed 
greater  regard  for  autonomy.  A  little  inge 
nuity,  a  good  deal  of  hardihood,  might  multi 
ply  such  futilities  indefinitely.  In  fact,  it 
would  be  possible  to  write  the  story  of  our 
Peloponnesian  war  in  phrases  of  Thucydides, 
and  I  should  not  be  surprised  if  such  a  task 
were  a  regular  school  exercise  at  Eton  or  at 
Rugby.  Why,  it  was  but  the  other  day  that 
Professor  Tyrrell,  of  Dublin,  translated  a  pas- 


74  TWO  WARS 


sage  from  Lowell's  Biglow  Papers  into  choice 
Aristophanese. 

Unfortunately,  such  feats,  as  I  have  already 
said,  imperil  one's  intellectual  honesty,  and 
one  would  not  like  to  imitate  the  Byzantine 
historians  who  were  given  to  similar  tricks. 
One  of  these  gentlemen,  Choricius  by  name, 
had  a  seaport  to  describe.  How  the  actual 
seaport  lay  mattered  little  to  Choricius,  so 
long  as  the  Epidamnus  of  Thucydides  was  at 
hand;  and  if  the  task  of  narrating  our  Pelo- 
ponnesian  war  were  assigned  to  the  ghost  of 
Choricius,  I  have  no  doubt  that  he  would  open 
it  with  a  description  of  Charleston  in  terms 
of  Epidamnus.  Little  matters  of  topography 
would  not  trouble  such  an  one.  To  the  sophist 
an  island  is  an  island,  a  river  a  river,  a  height 
a  height,  everywhere.  Sphacteria  would  fur 
nish  the  model  for  Morris  Island;  the  Ache- 
lous  would  serve  indifferently  for  Potomac  or 
Mississippi,  the  Epipolae  for  Missionary 
Ridge,  Plataea  for  Vicksburg,  the  harbor  of 
Syracuse  for  Hampton  Roads;  and  Thucydi 
des'  description  of  the  naval  engagement  and 


TWO  WARS  75 


the  watching  crowds  would  be  made  available 
for  the  fight  between  Merrimac  and  Monitor. 
The  debates  in  Thucydides  would  be  a 
quarry  for  the  debates  in  either  Congress,  as 
they  had  been  a  quarry  for  centuries  of  rhetori 
cal  historians.  And  as  for  the  "  winged 
words,"  why  should  they  have  wings,  if  not  to 
flit  from  character  to  character?  A  well- 
known  scholar,  at  a  loss  for  authentic  details 
as  to  the  life  of  Pindar,  fell  back  on  a  lot  of 
apophthegms  attributed  to  his  hero,  and  in  so 
doing  maintained  the  strange  doctrine  that 
apophthegms  were  more  to  be  trusted  than 
any  other  form  of  tradition.  There  could  not 
have  been  a  more  hopeless  thesis.  The  gen 
eral  who  said  that  he  would  burn  his  coat  if 
it  knew  his  plans  has  figured  in  all  the  wars 
with  which  I  have  been  contemporary,  was  a 
conspicuous  character  in  the  Mexican  war,  and 
passed  from  camp  to  camp  in  the  war  between 
the  States.  The  mot,  familiar  to  the  classical 
scholar,  was  doubtless  attributed  in  his  day  to 
that  dashing  sheik  Chedorlaomer,  and  will  be 
ascribed  to  both  leaders  in  the  final  battle  of 


76  TWO  WARS 


Armageddon.  The  hank  of  yarns  told  about 
Socrates  is  pieced  out  with  tabs  and  tags  bor 
rowed  from  different  periods.  I  have  heard, 
say,  in  the  afternoon,  a  good  story  at  the  ex 
pense  of  a  famous  American  revival  preacher 
which  I  had  read  that  morning  in  the  Cent 
Nouvelles  Nouvelles,  and  there  is  a  large 
stock  of  anecdotes  made  to  screw  on  and  screw 
off  for  the  special  behoof  of  college  presidents 
and  university  professors.  Why  hold  up  Cho- 
ricius  to  ridicule?  He  was  no  worse  than 
others  of  his  guild.  It  was  not  Choricius,  it 
was  another  Byzantine  historian  who  con 
veyed  from  Herodotus  an  unsavory  retort, 
over  which  the  unsuspecting  Gibbon  chuckles 
in  the  dark  cellar  of  his  notes,  where  he  keeps 
so  much  of  his  high  game.  The  Greek  his 
torian  of  the  Roman  Empire,  the  Roman  his 
torian  of  every  date,  are  no  better,  and  Dio- 
nysius  of  Halicarnassus,  who  has  devoted 
many  pages  to  the  arraignment  of  Thucydi- 
des'  style,  cribs  with  the  utmost  composure 
from  the  author  he  has  vilipended.  Still,  we 
must  not  set  down  every  coincidence  as  bor- 


TWO  WARS  77 


rowing.  Thucydides  himself  insists  on  the  re 
currence  of  the  same  or  similar  events  in  a  his 
tory  of  which  human  nature  is  a  constant 
factor.  "  Undo  this  button  "  is  not  necessarily 
a  quotation  from  King  Lear.  "  There  is  no 
way  but  this  "  was  original  with  Macaulay, 
and  not  stolen  from  Shakespeare.  "  Never 
mind,  general,  all  this  has  been  my  fault,"  are 
words  attributed  to  General  Lee  after  the  bat 
tle  of  Gettysburg.  This  is  very  much  the  lan 
guage  of  Gylippus  after  the  failure  of  his 
attack  on  the  Athenian  lines  before  Syracuse. 
How  many  heroic  as  well  as  unheroic  natures 
have  had  to  say  "  Mea  culpa,  mea  maxima 
culpa." 

Situations  may  recur,  sayings  may  recur, 
but  no  characters  come  back.  Nature  always 
breaks  her  mould.  "  I  could  not  help  mutter 
ing  to  myself,"  says  Coleridge  in  his  Bio- 
graphia  Literaria,  "  when  the  good  pastor 
this  morning  told  me  that  Klopstock  was  the 
German  Milton  '  a  very  German  Milton,  in 
deed  ! ! !  '  '  and  Coleridge's  italics  and  three 
exclamation  points  may  answer  for  all  paral- 


78  TWO  WARS 


lelisms.  When  historical  characters  get  far 
enough  off  it  may  be  possible  to  imitate  Plu 
tarch,  but  only  then.  Victor  Hugo  wrote  a 
passionate  protest  against  the  execution  of 
John  Brown,  in  which  he  compared  Virginia 
hanging  John  Brown  with  Washington  putting 
Spartacus  to  death.  What  Washington  would 
have  done  with  Spartacus  can  readily  be 
divined.  Those  who  have  stood  nearest  to 
Grant  and  Sherman,  to  Lee  and  Jackson,  the 
men,  fail  to  see  any  strong  resemblance  to 
leaders  in  other  wars.  Nicias,  in  the  Pelopon- 
nesian  war,  whose  name  means  Winfield,  has 
nothing  in  common  with  General  Scott,  whose 
plan  of  putting  down  the  rebellion,  the  "  Ana 
conda  Plan,"  as  it  was  called,  bears  some  re 
semblance  to  the  scheme  of  Demosthenes,  the 
Athenian  general,  for  quelling  the  Pelopon- 
nese.  Brasidas  was  in  some  respects  like 
Stonewall  Jackson,  but  Brasidas  was  not  a 
Presbyterian  elder,  nor  Stonewall  Jackson  a 
cajoling  diplomatist. 


TWO  WARS  79 


IV 

This  paper  is  rapidly  becoming  what  life 
is, — a  series  of  renunciations, — and  the  reader 
is  by  this  time  sufficiently  enlightened  as  to  the 
reasons  why  I  gave  up  the  ambitious  title  Two 
Wars,  and  substituted  A  Southerner  in  the 
Peloponnesian  War.  If  I  were  a  military 
man,  I  might  have  been  tempted  to  draw  some 
further  illustrations  from  the  history  of  the 
two  struggles,  but  my  short  and  desultory  serv 
ice  in  the  field  does  not  entitle  me  to  set  up  as  a 
strategist.  I  went  from  my  books  to  the  front, 
and  went  back  from  the  front  to  my  books, 
from  the  Confederate  war  to  the  Pelopon 
nesian  war,  from  Lee  and  Early  to  Thucydides 
and  Aristophanes.  I  fancy  that  I  understood 
my  Greek  history  and  my  Greek  authors  better 
for  my  experience  in  the  field,  but  some  degree 
of  understanding  would  have  come  to  me  even 
if  I  had  not  stirred  from  home.  For  while  my 
home  was  spared  until  the  month  preceding 
the  surrender,  every  vibration  of  the  great 
struggle  was  felt  at  the  foot  of  the  Blue  Ridge. 


8o  TWO  WARS 


We  were  not  too  far  off  to  sympathize  with 
the  scares  at  Richmond.  There  was  the 
Pawnee  affair,  for  instance.  Early  in  the  war 
all  Richmond  was  stirred  by  the  absurd  report 
that  the  Pawnee  was  on  its  way  up  James 
River  to  lay  the  Confederate  capital  in  ashes, 
just  as  all  Athens  was  stirred,  in  the  early  part 
of  the  Peloponnesian  war,  by  a  naval  demon 
stration  against  the  Piraeus.  The  Pawnee 
war,  as  it  was  jocularly  called,  did  not  last 
long.  Shot-guns  and  revolvers,  to  which  the 
civilian  soul  naturally  resorts  in  every  time  of 
trouble,  were  soon  laid  aside,  and  the  only 
artillery  to  which  the  extemporized  warriors 
were  exposed  was  the  artillery  of  jests.  Even 
now  survivors  of  those  days  recur  to  the 
tumultuous  excitement  of  that  Pawnee  Sunday 
as  among  the  memorable  things  of  the  war, 
and  never  without  merriment.  Perhaps  no 
body  expected  serious  resistance  to  be  made 
by  the  clergymen  and  the  department  clerks 
and  the  business  men  who  armed  themselves 
for  the  fray.  Home  guards  were  familiar 
butts  on  both  sides  of  the  line,  but  home  guards 


TWO  WARS  81 


have  been  known  to  die  in  battle,  and  death 
in  battle  is  supposed  to  be  rather  tragic  than 
otherwise.  Nor  is  the  tragedy  made  less  tragic 
by  the  age  of  the  combatant.  The  ancients 
thought  a  young  warrior  dead  something  fair 
to  behold.  To  Greek  poet  and  Roman  poet 
alike  an  aged  warrior  is  a  pitiable  spectacle. 
No  one  is  likely  to  forget  Virgil's  Priam,  Tyr- 
taeus'  description  of  an  old  soldier  on  the  field 
of  battle  came  up  to  me  more  than  once,  and 
there  is  stamped  forever  on  my  mind  the  image 
of  one  dying  Confederate,  "  with  white  hair 
and  hoary  beard,  breathing  out  his  brave  soul 
in  the  dust "  on  the  western  bank  of  the  fair 
Shenandoah.  Yet  a  few  weeks  before,  that 
same  old  Confederate,  as  a  member  of  the 
awkward  squad,  would  have  been  a  legitimate 
object  of  ridicule;  and  so  the  heroes  of  the 
Pawnee  war,  the  belted  knights,  or  knights 
who  would  have  been  belted  could  belts  have 
been  found  for  their  civic  girth,  were  twitted 
with  their  heroism. 

But  our  scares  were  not  confined  to  scares 
that  came  from  Richmond.    One  cavalry  raid 


83  TWO  WARS 


came  up  to  our  very  doors,  and  Custer  and  his 
men  were  repelled  by  a  handful  of  reserve 
artillerymen.  Our  home  guard  was  sum 
moned  more  than  once  to  defend  Rockfish 
Gap,  and  I  remember  one  long  summer  night 
spent  as  a  mounted  picket  on  the  road  to  Pal 
myra.  Every  battle  in  that  "  dancing  ground 
of  war  "  brought  to  the  great  Charlottesville 
hospital  sad  reinforcements  of  wounded  men. 
Crutch-races  between  one-legged  soldiers  were 
organized,  and  there  were  timber-toe  qua 
drilles  and  one-armed  cotillions.  Out  of  the 
shelter  of  the  Blue  Ridge  it  was  easy  enough 
to  get  into  the  range  of  bullets.  A  semblance 
of  college  life  was  kept  up  at  the  University  of 
Virginia.  The  students  were  chiefly  maimed 
soldiers  and  boys  under  military  age ;  but  when 
things  grew  hot  in  front,  maimed  soldiers 
would  edge  nearer  to  the  hell  of  battle  and  the 
boys  would  rush  off  to  the  game  of  powder  and 
ball.  One  little  band  of  these  college  boys 
chose  an  odd  time  for  their  baptism  of  fire,  and 
were  put  into  action  during  the  famous  fight 
of  "  the  bloody  angle."  From  the  night  when 


TWO  WARS  83 


word  was  brought  that  the  Federals  had  occu 
pied  Alexandria  to  the  time  when  I  hobbled 
into  the  provost  marshal's  office  at  Charlottes- 
ville  and  took  the  oath  of  allegiance,  the  war 
was  part  of  my  life,  and  it  is  not  altogether 
surprising  that  the  memories  of  the  Confeder 
acy  come  back  to  me  whenever  I  contemplate 
the  history  of  the  Peloponnesian  war,  which 
bulks  so  largely  in  all  Greek  studies.  And 
that  is  all  this  paper  really  means.  It  belongs 
to  the  class  of  inartistic  performances  of  which 
Aristotle  speaks  so  slightingly.  It  has  no 
unity  except  the  accidental  unity  of  person.  A 
Southerner  in  the  Peloponnesian  War  has  no 
more  artistic  right  to  be  than  A  Girl  in  the 
Carpathians  or  A  Scholar  in  Politics,  and  yet 
it  may  serve  as  a  document.  But  what  will 
not  serve  as  a  document  to  the  modern  his 
torian?  The  historian  is  no  longer  the  poor 
creature  described  by  Aristotle.  He  is  no  an 
nalist,  no  chronicler.  He  is  not  dragged  along 
by  the  mechanical  sequence  of  events.  *  The 
master  of  them  that  know  "  did  not  know 
everything.  He  did  not  know  that  history 


84  TWO  WARS 


was  to  become  as  plastic  as  poetry,  as  dramatic 
as  a  play. 


The  war  was  a  good  time  for  the  study  of 
the  conflict  between  Athens  and  Sparta.  It 
was  a  great  time  for  reading  and  re-reading 
classical  literature  generally,  for  the  South 
was  blockaded  against  new  books  as  effect 
ively,  almost,  as  Megara  was  blockaded 
against  garlic  and  salt.  The  current  literature 
of  those  three  or  four  years  was  a  blank  to 
most  Confederates.  Few  books  got  across  the 
line.  A  vigorous  effort  was  made  to  supply 
our  soldiers  with  Bibles  and  parts  of  the  Bible, 
and  large  consignments  ran  the  blockade. 
Else  little  came  from  abroad,  and  few  books 
were  reprinted  in  the  Confederacy.  Of  these 
I  recall  especially  Bulwer's  Strange  Story; 
Victor  Hugo's  Les  Miserables,  popularly  pro 
nounced  "Lee's  Miserables";  and  the  his 
torical  novels  of  Louise  Muhlbach,  known  to 
the  Confederate  soldier  as  "  Lou  Mealbag." 


TWO  WARS 


All  were  eagerly  read,  but  Cosette  and  Fantine 
and  Joseph  the  Second  would  not  last  forever, 
and  we  fell  back  on  the  old  stand-bys.  Some 
of  us  exhumed  neglected  treasures,  and  I  re 
member  that  I  was  fooled  by  Bulwer's  com 
mendation  of  Charron  into  reading  that 
feebler  Montaigne.  The  Southerner,  always 
conservative  in  his  tastes  and  no  great  admirer 
of  American  literature,  which  had  become 
largely  alien  to  him,  went  back  to  his  English 
classics,  his  ancient  classics.  Old  gentlemen 
past  the  military  age  furbished  up  their  Latin 
and  Greek.  Some  of  them  had  never  let  their 
Latin  and  Greek  grow  rusty.  When  I  was 
serving  on  General  Gordon's  staff,  I  met  at 
Millwood,  in  Clarke  County,  a  Virginian  of 
the  old  school  who  declaimed  with  fiery 
emphasis,  in  the  original,  choice  passages 
of  Demosthenes'  tirade  against  ^schines. 
Not  Demosthenes  himself  could  have  given 
more  effective  utterance  to  "  Hearest  thou, 
^Eschines?  "  I  thought  of  my  old  friend 
again  not  so  very  long  ago,  when  I  read  the 
account  that  the  most  brilliant  of  modern  Ger- 


86  TWO  WARS 


man  classicists  gives  of  his  encounter  with  a 
French  schoolmaster  at  Beauvais  in  1870,  dur 
ing  the  Franco-Prussian  war,  and  of  the  heated 
discussion  that  ensued  about  the  comparative 
merits  of  Euripides  and  Racine.  The  book 
man  is  not  always  killed  in  a  man  by  service 
in  the  field.  True,  Lachmann  dropped  his 
Propertius  to  take  up  arms  for  his  country,  but 
Reisig  annotated  his  Aristophanes  in  camp, 
and  everybody  knows  the  story  of  Courier,  the 
soldier  Hellenist.  But  the  tendency  of  life 
in  the  open  air  is  to  make  the  soul  imbody  and 
imbrute,  and  after  a  while  one  begins  to  think 
scholarship  a  disease,  or,  at  any  rate,  a  bad 
habit;  and  the  Scythian  nomad,  or,  if  you 
choose,  the  Texan  cowboy,  seems  to  be  the  nor 
mal,  healthy  type.  You  put  your  Pickering 
Homer  in  your  kit.  It  drops  out  by  reason  of 
some  sudden  change  of  base,  and  you  do  not 
mourn  as  you  ought  to  do.  The  fact  is  you 
have  not  read  a  line  for  a  month.  But  when 
the  Confederate  volunteer  returned,  let  us  say, 
from  Jack's  Shop  or  some  such  homely  local 
ity,  and  opened  his  Thucydides,  the  old  charm 


TWO  WARS  87 


came  back  with  the  studious  surroundings,  and 
the  familiar  first  words  renewed  the  spell. 

"  Thucydides  of  Athens  wrote  up  the  war 
of  the  Peloponnesians  and  Athenians."  "  The 
war  of  the  Peloponnesians  and  Athenians  "  is 
a  somewhat  lumbering  way  of  saying  "  the 
Peloponnesian  war."  But  Thucydides  never 
says  "  the  Peloponnesian  war."  Why  not? 
Perhaps  his  course  in  this  matter  was  deter 
mined  by  a  spirit  of  judicial  fairness.  How 
ever  that  may  be,  either  he  employs  some 
phrase  like  the  one  cited,  or  he  says  "  this 
war  "  as  we  say  "  the  war,"  as  if  there  were 
no  other  war  on  record.  "  Revolutionary 
war,"  "  war  of  1812,"  "  Seminole  war," 
"  Mexican  war," — all  these  run  glibly  from 
our  tongues,  but  we  also  lumber  when  we  wish 
to  be  accurate.  The  names  of  wars,  like  the 
names  of  diseases,  are  generally  put  off  on  the 
party  of  the  other  part.  We  say  "  French  and 
Indian  war  "  without  troubling  ourselves  to 
ask  what  the  French  and  Indians  called  it,  but 
"  Northern  war  "  and  u  Southern  war  "  were 
never  popular  designations.  "  The  war  be- 


88  TWO  WARS 


tween  the  States,"  which  a  good  many  South 
erners  prefer,  is  both  bookish  and  inexact. 
"  Civil  war  "  is  an  utter  misnomer.  It  was 
used  and  is  still  used  by  courteous  people,  the 
same  people  who  are  careful  to  say  "  Federal  " 
and  "  Confederate."  "  War  of  the  rebel 
lion,"  which  begs  the  very  question  at  issue,  has 
become  the  official  designation  of  the  struggle, 
but  has  found  no  acceptance  with  the  van 
quished.  To  this  day  no  Southerner  uses  it 
except  by  way  of  quotation,  as  in  Rebellion 
Record,  and  even  in  the  North  it  was  only  by 
degrees  that  "  reb  "  replaced  "  secesh."  "  Se 
cession  "  was  not  a  word  with  which  to  charm 
the  "  old-line  Whigs  "  of  the  South.  They 
would  fight  the  battles  of  the  secessionists,  but 
they  would  not  bear  their  name.  "  The  war  of 
secession  "  is  still  used  a  good  deal  in  foreign 
books,  but  it  has  no  popular  hold.  "  The 
war,"  without  any  further  qualification,  served 
the  turn  of  Thucydides  and  Aristophanes  for 
the  Peloponnesian  war.  It  will  serve  ours, 
let  it  be  hoped,  for  some  time  to  come. 


TWO  WARS  «9 


VI 

A  Confederate  commentary  on  Thucydi- 
des,  on  the  scale  of  the  remarks  just  made  on 
the  name  of  the  war,  would  outrun  the  lines  of 
this  study.  Let  us  pass  from  Thucydides  to 
the  other  contemporary  chronicler  who  turns 
out  some  sides  of  the  "  Doric  war  "  about 
which  Thucydides  is  silent.  The  antique 
Clio  gathers  up  her  robe  and  steps  tiptoe 
over  rubbishy  details  that  are  the  delight  of 
the  comic  poet  and  the  modern  Muse  of  His 
tory.  Thucydides,  it  is  true,  gives  us  a  minute 
account  of  the  plague.  That  was  a  subject 
which  commended  itself  to  his  saturnine  spirit, 
and  in  his  description  he  deigns  to  speak  of  the 
"  stuffy  cabooses "  into  which  the  country 
people  were  crowded  when  the  Lacedaemo 
nians  invaded  Attica.  But  when  Aristophanes 
touches  the  same  chapter,  he  goes  into  pictur 
esque  details  about  the  rookeries  and  the  wine- 
jars  inhabited  by  the  newcomers.  Diogenes' 
jar,  commonly  misnamed  a  tub,  was  no  inven 
tion,  and  I  have  known  less  comfortable  quar- 


90  TWO  WARS 


ters  than  the  hogshead  which  I  occupied  for  a 
day  or  two  in  one  of  my  outings  during  the 
war. 

The  plague  was  too  serious  a  matter  for 
even  Aristophanes  to  make  fun  of,  and  the 
annalist  of  the  war  between  the  States  will  not 
find  any  parallel  in  the  chronicles  of  the  South. 
There  was  no  such  epidemic  as  still  shows  its 
livid  face  in  the  pages  of  Thucydides  and  the 
verses  of  Lucretius.  True,  some  diseases  of 
which  civic  life  makes  light  proved  to  be  veri 
table  scourges  in  camp.  Measles  was  espe 
cially  fatal  to  the  country-bred,  and  for  abject 
misery  I  have  never  seen  anything  like  those 
cases  of  measles  in  which  nostalgia  had  super 
vened.  Nostalgia,  which  we  are  apt  to  sneer 
at  as  a  doctor's  name  for  homesickness,  and  to 
class  with  cachexy  and  borborygmus,  was  a 
power  for  evil  in  those  days,  and  some  of  our 
finest  troops  were  thinned  out  by  it,  noto 
riously  the  North  Carolinians,  whose  attach 
ment  to  the  soil  of  their  State  was  as  passion 
ate  as  that  of  any  Greeks,  ancient  or  modern, 
Attic  or  Peloponnesian. 


TWO  WARS  91 


But  the  frightful  mortality  of  the  camp  does 
not  strike  the  imagination  so  forcibly  as  does 
the  carnage  of  the  battlefield,  and  no  layman 
cares  to  analyze  hospital  reports  and  compare 
the  medical  with  the  surgical  history  of  the 
war.  Famine,  the  twin  evil  of  pestilence,  is 
not  so  easily  forgotten,  and  the  dominant  note 
of  Aristophanes,  hunger,  was  the  dominant 
note  of  life  in  the  Confederacy,  civil  as  well  as 
military.  The  Confederate  soldier  was  often 
on  short  rations,  but  the  civilian  was  not  much 
better  off.  I  do  not  mean  those  whose  larders 
were  swept  by  the  besom  of  the  invaders. 
u  Not  a  dust  of  flour,  not  an  ounce  of  meat, 
left  in  the  house,"  was  not  an  uncommon  cry 
along  the  line  of  march ;  but  it  was  heard  else 
where,  and  I  remember  how  I  raked  up  ex 
amples  of  European  and  Asiatic  frugality  with 
which  to  reinforce  my  editorials  and  hearten 
my  readers, — the  scanty  fare  of  the  French 
peasant,  the  raw  oatmeal  of  the  Scotch  stone 
cutter,  the  flinty  bread  of  the  Swiss  moun 
taineer,  the  Spaniard's  cloves  of  garlic,  the 
Greek's  handful  of  olives,  and  the  Hindoo's 


92  TWO  WARS 


handful  of  rice.  The  situation  was  often 
gayly  accepted.  The  not  infrequent  procla 
mation  of  f astdays  always  served  as  a  text  for 
mutual  banter,  and  starvation-parties  were  the 
rule,  social  gatherings  at  which  apples  were 
the  chief  refreshment.  Strange  streaks  of 
luxury  varied  this  dead  level  of  scant  and  plain 
fare.  The  stock  of  fine  wines,  notably  ma 
deiras,  for  which  the  South  was  famous,  did 
not  all  go  to  the  hospitals.  Here  and  there 
provident  souls  had  laid  in  boxes  of  tea  and 
bags  of  coffee  that  carried  them  through  the 
war,  and  the  chief  outlay  was  for  sugar,  which 
rose  in  price  as  the  war  went  on,  until  it  almost 
regained  the  poetical  character  it  bore  in 
Shakespeare's  time.  Sugar,  tea,  and  coffee 
once  compassed,  the  daintiness  of  old  times 
occasionally  came  back,  and  I  have  been  as 
sured  by  those  who  brought  gold  with  them 
that  Richmond  was  a  paradise  of  cheap  and 
good  living  during  the  war,  just  as  the  United 
States  will  be  for  foreigners  when  our  cur 
rency  becomes  as  abundant  as  it  was  in  the  last 
years  of  the  Confederacy.  Gresham's  law 


TWO  WARS  93 


ought  to  be  called  Aristophanes'  law.  In  all 
matters  pertaining  to  the  sphere  of  civic  life, 
merry  Aristophanes  is  of  more  value  than 
sombre  Thucydides,  and  if  the  gospel  of  peace 
which  he  preaches  is  chiefly  a  variation  on  the 
theme  of  something  to  eat,  small  blame  to  him. 
Critics  have  found  fault  with  the  appetite  of 
Odysseus  as  set  forth  by  Homer.  No  Confed 
erate  soldier  will  subscribe  to  the  censure, 
and  there  are  no  scenes  in  Aristophanes  that 
appeal  more  strongly  to  the  memory  of  the 
Southerner,  civilian  or  soldier,  than  those  in 
which  the  pinch  of  war  makes  itself  felt. 

Farmers  and  planters  made  their  moan  dur 
ing  the  Confederacy,  and  doubtless  they  had 
much  to  suffer.  "  Impressment n  is  not  a 
pleasant  word  at  any  time,  and  the  tribute  that 
the  countryman  had  to  yield  to  the  defense  of 
the  South  was  ruinous, — the  indirect  tribute 
as  well  as  the  direct.  The  farmers  of  Virginia 
were  much  to  be  pitied.  Their  homes  were 
filled  with  refugee  kinsfolk;  wounded  Confed 
erates  preferred  the  private  house  to  the  hos 
pital.  Hungry  soldiers  and  soldiers  who  fore- 


94  TWO  WARS 


stalled  the  hunger  of  weeks  to  come,  laid  siege 
to  larder,  smoke-house,  spring-house.  Pay, 
often  tendered,  was  hardly  ever  accepted.  The 
cavalryman  was  perhaps  a  trifle  less  welcome 
than  the  infantryman,  because  of  the  capacious 
horse  and  the  depleted  corn-bin,  but  few  were 
turned  away.  Yet  there  was  the  liberal  earth, 
and  the  farmer  did  not  starve,  as  did  the 
wretched  civilian  whose  dependence  was  a 
salary,  which  did  not  advance  with  the  rising 
tide  of  the  currency.  The  woes  of  the  war 
clerks  in  Richmond  and  of  others  are  on  rec 
ord,  and  important  contributions  have  been 
made  to  the  economical  history  of  the  Confed 
erate  States.  I  will  not  draw  on  these  stores. 
I  will  only  tell  of  what  I  have  lived,  as  de 
manded  by  the  title  of  this  paper.  The  income 
of  the  professors  of  the  University  of  Virginia 
was  nominally  the  same  during  the  war  that  it 
was  before,  but  the  purchasing  power  of  the 
currency  steadily  diminished.  If  it  had  not 
been  for  a  grant  of  woodland,  we  should  have 
frozen  as  well  as  starved  during  the  last  year 
of  the  war,  when  the  quest  of  food  had  become 


TWO  WARS  95 


a  serious  matter.  In  our  direst  straits  we  had 
not  learned  to  dispense  with  household  serv 
ice,  and  the  household  servants  were  never 
stinted  of  their  rations,  though  the  masters 
had  to  content  themselves  with  the  most 
meagre  fare.  The  farmers,  generous  enough 
to  the  soldiers,  were  not  overconsiderate  of 
the  non-combatants.  Often  the  only  way  of 
procuring  our  coarse  food  was  by  making  con 
tracts  to  be  paid  after  the  war  in  legal  cur 
rency,  and  sometimes  payment  in  gold  was  ex 
acted.  The  contracts  were  not  always  kept, 
and  the  unfortunate  civilian  had  to  make  new 
contracts  at  an  enhanced  price.  Before  my 
first  campaign  in  1861,  I  had  bought  a  little 
gold  and  silver,  for  use  in  case  of  capture,  and 
if  it  had  not  been  for  that  precious  hoard  I 
might  not  be  writing  this  sketch.  But  despite 
the  experience  of  the  airy  gentlemen  who 
alighted  in  Richmond  during  the  war,  even 
gold  and  silver  would  not  always  work  won 
ders.  Bacon  and  corned  beef  in  scant  measure 
were  the  chief  of  our  diet,  and  not  always 
easy  to  procure.  I  have  ridden  miles  and 


96  TWO  WARS 


miles,  with  silver  in  my  palm,  seeking  daintier 
food  for  the  women  of  my  household,  but  in 
vain.  There  was  nothing  to  do  except  to 
tighten  one's  belt,  and  to  write  editorials  show 
ing  up  the  selfishness  of  the  farming  class  and 
prophesying  the  improvement  of  the  currency. 
No  wonder,  then,  that  with  such  an  expe 
rience  a  bookish  Confederate  should  turn  to 
the  Aristophanic  account  of  the  Peloponnesian 
war  with  sympathetic  interest.  The  Athe 
nians,  it  is  true,  were  not  blockaded  as  we  were, 
and  the  Athenian  beaux  and  belles  were  not 
reduced  to  the  straits  that  every  Confederate 
man,  assuredly  every  Confederate  woman,  can 
remember.  Our  blockade-runners  could  not 
supply  the  demands  of  our  population.  We 
went  back  to  first  principles.  Thorns  were  for 
pins,  and  dogwood  sticks  for  toothbrushes. 
Rag-bags  were  ransacked.  Impossible  gar 
ments  were  made  possible.  Miracles  of  turn 
ing  were  performed,  not  only  in  coats,  but  even 
in  envelopes.  Whoso  had  a  dress  coat  gave  it 
to  his  womankind  in  order  to  make  the  body 
of  a  riding-habit.  Dainty  feet  were  shod  in 


TWO  WARS  97 


home-made  foot-gear  which  one  durst  not  call 
shoes.  Fairy  fingers  which  had  been  stripped 
of  jewelled  rings  wore  bone  circlets  carved  by 
idle  soldiers.  There  were  no  more  genuine 
tears  than  those  which  flowed  from  the  eyes  of 
the  Southern  women  resident  within  the  Fed 
eral  lines  when  they  saw  the  rig  of  their  kins 
women,  at  the  cessation  of  hostilities.  And 
all  this  grotesqueness,  all  this  dilapidation, 
was  shot  through  by  specimens  of  individual 
finery,  by  officers  who  had  brought  back  re 
splendent  uniforms  from  beyond  seas,  by  hero 
ines  who  had  engineered  themselves  and  their 
belongings  across  the  Potomac. 

Of  all  this  the  scholar  found  nothing  in  the 
records  of  the  Peloponnesian  war.  The 
women  of  Megara  may  have  suffered,  but 
hardly  the  Corinthian  women;  and  the  Athe 
nian  dames  and  damsels  were  as  particular 
about  their  shoes  and  their  other  cordwainer's 
wares  as  ever.  The  story  that  Socrates  and 
his  wife  had  but  one  upper  garment  between 
them  is  a  stock  joke,  as  I  have  shown  else 
where.  "  Who  first  started  the  notable  jest 


98  TWO  WARS 


it  is  impossible,  at  this  distance  of  time,  to  dis 
cover,  just  as  it  is  impossible  to  tell  whose 
refined  wit  originated  the  conception  of  the 
man  who  lies  abed  while  his  solitary  shirt  is  in 
the  wash."  The  story  was  intended  to  illus 
trate,  not  the  scarcity  of  raiment  in  the  Pelo- 
ponnesian  war,  but  the  abundance  of  philoso 
phy  in  the  Socratic  soul.  All  through  that  war 
the  women  of  Athens  seem  to  have  had  as 
much  finery  as  was  good  for  them.  The  pinch 
was  felt  at  other  points,  and  there  the  Con 
federate  sympathy  was  keen. 

In  The  Acharnians  of  Aristophanes,  the 
hero,  Dicseopolis,  makes  a  separate  peace  on 
his  individual  account  with  the  Peloponnesians 
and  drives  a  brisk  trade  with  the  different 
cantons,  the  enthusiasm  reaching  its  height 
when  the  Boeotian  appears  with  his  ducks  and 
his  eels.  This  ecstasy  can  best  be  understood 
by  those  who  have  seen  the  capture  of  a  sutler's 
wagon  by  hungry  Confederates ;  and  the  fan 
tastic  vision  of  a  separate  peace  became  a  sober 
reality  at  many  points  on  the  lines  of  the  con 
tending  parties.  The  Federal  outposts  twitted 


TWO  WARS  99 


ours  with  their  lack  of  coffee  and  sugar;  ours 
taunted  the  Federals  with  their  lack  of  to 
bacco.  Such  gibes  often  led,  despite  the  of 
ficers,  to  friendly  interchange.  So,  for 
instance,  a  toy-boat  which  bore  the  significant 
name  of  a  parasite  familiar  to  both  sides  made 
regular  trips  across  the  Rappahannock  after 
the  dire  struggle  at  Fredericksburg,  and 
promoted  international  exchange  between 
"Yank"  and  "Johnny  Reb."  The  day 
dream  of  Aristophanes  became  a  sober  cer 
tainty. 

The  war  was  not  an  era  of  sweetness  and 
light.  Perhaps  sugar  was  the  article  most 
missed.  Maple  sugar  was  of  too  limited  pro 
duction  to  meet  the  popular  need.  Sorghum 
was  a  horror  then,  is  a  horror  to  remember 
now.  It  set  our  teeth  on  edge  and  clawed  off 
the  coats  of  our  stomachs.  In  the  army  sugar 
was  doled  out  by  pinches,  and  from  the  tables 
of  most  citizens  it  was  banished  altogether. 
There  were  those  who  solaced  themselves  with 
rye  coffee  and  sorghum  molasses  regardless  of 
ergot  and  acid,  but  nobler  souls  would  not  be 


ioo  TWO  WARS 


untrue  to  their  gastronomic  ideal.  Necessity 
is  one  thing,  mock  luxury  another.  If  there 
had  been  honey  enough,  we  should  have  been 
on  the  antique  basis;  for  honey  was  the  sugar 
of  antiquity,  and  all  our  cry  for  sugar  was  but 
an  echo  of  the  cry  for  honey  in  the  Pelopon- 
nesian  war.  Honey  was  then,  as  it  is  now, 
one  of  the  chief  products  of  Attica.  It  is  not 
likely  that  the  Peloponnesians  took  the  trouble 
to  burn  over  the  beds  of  thyme  that  gave  Attic 
honey  its  peculiar  flavor,  but  the  Peloponne 
sians  would  not  have  been  soldiers  if  they  had 
not  robbed  every  beehive  on  the  march ;  and, 
sad  to  relate,  the  Athenians  must  have  been 
forced  to  import  honey.  When  Dicaeopolis 
makes  the  separate  peace  mentioned  above, 
he  gets  up  a  feast  of  good  things,  and  there  is 
a  certain  unction  in  the  tone  with  which  he 
orders  the  basting  of  sausage-meat  with  honey, 
as  one  should  say  mutton  and  currant  jelly.  In 
The  Peace,  when  War  appears  and  proceeds 
to  make  a  salad,  he  says, — 

I'll  pour  some  Attic  honey  in. 


TWO  WARS  101 


Whereupon  Trygaeus  cries  out, — 

Ho,  there,  I  warn  you  use  some  other  honey. 
Be  sparing  of  the  Attic.     That  costs  sixpence. 

Attic  honey  has  the  ring  of  New  Orleans 
molasses;  "  those  molasses,"  as  the  article  was 
often  called,  with  an  admiring  plural  of 
majesty. 

But  a  Confederate  student,  like  the  rest  of 
his  tribe,  could  more  readily  renounce  sweet 
ness  than  light,  and  light  soon  became  a  serious 
matter.  The  American  demands  a  flood  of 
light,  and  wonders  at  the  English  don  who 
pursues  his  investigations  by  the  glimmer  of 
two  candles.  It  was  hard  to  go  back  to  primi 
tive  tallow  dips.  Lard  might  have  served, 
but  it  was  too  precious  to  be  used  in  lamps. 
The  new  devices  were  dismal,  such  as  the  vile 
stuff  called  terebene,  which  smoked  and  smelt 
more  than  it  illuminated,  such  as  the  wax 
tapers  which  were  coiled  round  bottles  that 
had  seen  better  days.  Many  preferred  the  old 
way,  and  read  by  flickering  pine-knots,  which 
cost  many  an  old  reader  his  eyes. 


103  TWO  WARS 


Now,  tallow  dips,  lard,  wax  tapers,  tere- 
bene,  pine-knots,  were  all  represented  in  the 
Peloponnesian  war  by  oil.  Oil,  one  of  the 
great  staples  of  Attica,  became  scarcer  as  the 
war  went  on.  "  A  bibulous  wick  "  was  a  sin 
ner  against  domestic  economy;  to  trim  a  lamp 
and  hasten  combustion  was  little  short  of  a 
crime.  Management  in  the  use  of  oil — other 
wise  considered  the  height  of  niggardliness — 
was  the  rule,  and  could  be  all  the  more  readily 
understood  by  the  Confederate  student  when 
he  reflected  that  oil  was  the  great  lubricant  as 
well ;  that  it  was  the  Attic  butter,  and  to  a  con 
siderable  extent  the  Attic  soap.  Under  the 
Confederacy  butter  mounted  to  the  financial 
milky  way,  not  to  be  scaled  of  ordinary  men, 
and  soap  was  also  a  problem.  Modern  chem 
ists  have  denied  the  existence  of  true  soap  in 
antiquity.  The  soap-suds  that  got  into  the 
eyes  of  the  Athenian  boy  on  the  occasion  of 
his  Saturday-night  scrubbing  were  not  real 
soap-suds,  but  a  kind  of  lye  used  for  desperate 
cases.  The  oil-flask  was  the  Athenian's  soap 
box.  No  wonder,  then,  that  oil  was  exceeding 


TWO  WARS  103 


precious  in  the  Peloponnesian  war,  and  no 
wonder  that  all  these  little  details  of  daily 
hardship  come  back  even  now  to  the  old  stu 
dent  when  he  reopens  his  Aristophanes.  No 
wonder  that  the  ever  present  Peloponnesian 
war  will  not  suffer  him  to  forget  those  four 
years  in  which  the  sea  of  trouble  rose  higher 
and  higher. 


NOTES 


NOTES 

(The  marginal  numbers  refer  to  the  pages  of  the  text) 

This  article  was  prepared  (in  1891)  at  the  7 
instance  of  Mr.  HORACE  SCUDDER,  the  editor  of  the 
Atlantic  Monthly,  who  had  projected  a  series  of 
papers  to  be  written  by  men  who  by  virtue  of  educa 
tion,  intellectual  endowment  and  social  position  were 
supposed  to  be  high  and  lifted  up  above  vulgar  pas 
sion  and  prejudice.  The  business  of  these  elect  gen 
tlemen  wras  to  set  forth  the  motives  that  urged  them 
to  an  active  participation  in  so  rude  an  affair  as  war. 
After  publication  in  the  Atlantic,  the  essays  were  to 
be  gathered  into  a  book  and  Mr.  SCUDDER  fancied 
that  thus  collected  they  would  prove  a  valuable  addi 
tion  to  the  history  of  the  times.  The  series  stopped  at 
the  third  number  and  the  book  was  never  published. 
Whilst  I  did  not  concur  in  Mr.  SCUDDER'S  view,  I 
accepted  the  compliment  and  began  to  write  with  a 
lighter  heart  than  I  bore  as  I  went  on.  At  the  end  I 
was  dipping  my  pen  into  something  red,  into  some 
thing  briny,  that  was  not  ink.  The  feeling  seems  to 
have  been  contagious,  for  some  years  afterwards 
(1899)  Mr.  WILLIAM  ARCHER,  in  his  America  To 
day  (p.  142),  wrote  as  follows: 

"  I  met  a  scholar-soldier  in  the  South  who  had  7 
given  expression  to  the  sentiment  of  his  race  and  gen- 


108  NOTES 


eration  in  an  essay — one  might  almost  say  an  elegy — 
so  chivalrous  in  spirit  and  so  fine  in  literary  form  that 
it  moved  me  well-nigh  to  tears.  Reading  it  at  a 
public  library,  I  found  myself  so  visibly  affected  by 
it  that  my  neighbor  at  the  desk  glanced  at  me  in  sur 
prise,  and  I  had  to  pull  myself  sharply  together." 

9  I  had  a  similar  experience  some  years  after  I 
wrote  this  paper,  when  I  was  spending  the  summer  at 
Westport  on  Lake  Champlain.  Wandering  far 
enough  off  into  the  country  to  lose  myself — for  me 
no  unfamiliar  feat — I  joined  a  man  who  was  driving 
his  cows  to  town  and  in  my  talk  with  him  it  turned 
out  that  he  had  been  through  the  Valley  campaign  on 
the  other  side,  and  together  we  recalled  encounters 
and  scenes  that  were  not  recorded  in  the  histories, 
insignificant  skirmishes — significant  enough  to  those 
who  were  killed  and  maimed.  Who  remembers  the 
little  brush  at  Weir's  Cave,  where  the  Confederates 
came  near  bagging  General  Merritt?  I  have  not 
been  allowed  to  forget  it  these  fifty  years. 

1O  Apropos  of  this  passage  my  friend  and  classmate 
of  the  Princeton  days,  Gen.  BRADLEY  T.  JOHNSON, 
told  me  that  one  hot  day  riding  to  meet  a  fight 
that  would  make  the  day  still  hotter,  he  stopped  at  a 
roadside  cabin  and  asked  for  a  drink  of  water.  The 
woman  who  brought  it,  brought  it  in  a  broken  and 
cracked  mug,  and  he  assured  me  that  every  ramifica 
tion  of  those  cracks  was  indelibly  impressed  on  his 


NOTES  109 


brain.  He  could  have  drawn  a  map  of  the  mug. 
Experiences  like  these  help  us  to  understand  the  de 
tails  of  the  Homeric  narrative,  and  to  me  there  is 
nothing  unnatural  in  Homer's  mention  of  the  wash 
ing  troughs  that  Hector  saw  as  he  fled  before  the  face 
of  Achilles  (11.22,  1 54  foil.). 

The  fight  under  EARLY,  to  which  I  refer,  was  10 
fought  July  24,  1864.  It  was  a  brilliant  feat  of  arms 
and  has  left  other  memories  than  those  recorded. 
As  A.  D.  C.  to  General  GORDON  I  gave  General 
TERRY,  one  of  the  brigade  commanders,  the  order  to 
advance,  and  I  still  hear  the  cry  of  one  of  the  men 
who  had  been  in  a  disastrous  affair  a  few  weeks 
before — the  fight  in  which  Gen.  W.  E.  JONES  fell. 
"  This  hain't  no  New  Hope,  Gineral."  I  still  see  the 
light  of  battle  on  the  faces  of  the  men  as  they  went 
forward.  My  blood  tingles  as  I  write. 

"  Deboshed  "  is  a  reminiscence  of  an  essay  of  Low-  1 1 
ELL'S  on  Reconstruction,  in  which  he  makes  light  of 
Southern  claims  to  aristocracy. 

General  LEE  always  referred  to  the  enemy  as  12 
"  those  people."  JOHN  S.  WISE,  Atlantic  Monthly, 
April,  1894.  WISE  is  one  ear-witness  among  many, 
and  I  thought  of  General  LEE,  as  well  as  of  Dante, 
when  I  wrote  in  my  Introductory  Essay  to  Pindar, 
xxxviii : 

A  word,  an  epithet,  and  the  picture  is  there,  drawn  with 
a  stroke.     In  the  second  Olympian  P.  is  telling  of  the 

8 


NOTES 


blessedness  of  the  souls  that  have  overcome.  When  he 
comes  to  the  damned,  he  calls  them  simply  "  those."  — 
Non  ragioniam  di  lor. 

12  Lieut.  Gen.  JOHN  B.  GORDON,  Reminiscences,  p. 
422.  Perhaps  I  may  be  pardoned  for  adding  that 
when  I  read  the  passage  in  which  mention  is  made  of 
my  service  on  his  staff,  I  wrote  to  my  chief,  whose  own 
bearing  on  the  battlefield  was  an  inspiration,  that  no 
tribute  to  my  Greek  scholarship  I  had  received  or 
could  receive  would  ever  be  more  cherished,  if  so 
much;  and  I  cited  the  famous  epitaph  inscribed  on 
the  tomb  of  Aeschylus  at  Gela.  No  mention  is  made 
of  his  great  tragedies.  It  is  simply  recorded  that 
Aeschylus  had  quitted  himself  like  a  man  in  the 
Persian  war. 

a\Kr)V  8'  euo\>/aju,oi>  Mapaflwnov  aAo~os  av  enrol 


In  these  Notes  I  am  furnishing  a  key  to  the  per 
sons  referred  to  in  the  article.  There  is  a  Confederate 
graveyard  near  my  old  home,  the  University  of  Vir 
ginia,  in  which  hundreds  of  those  who  fell  on  the 
field  or  perished  in  the  hospital,  were  laid  to  rest.  At 
first  a  rude  headboard  marked  each  grave  with  the 
name,  the  company,  the  regiment,  to  be  replaced,  it 
was  thought,  by  some  more  substantial  monument  at 
the  end  of  the  war;  but  the  end  of  the  war  brought 
the  consciousness  of  dire  poverty  that  could  hardly 


NOTES  in 


furnish  food  for  the  living,  and  so  it  was  sadly  re 
solved  rather  than  leave  these  ghastly  and  decaying 
reminders  of  individual  suffering  and  sacrifice  to 
level  the  whole  field  and  sow  it  in  grass,  but  not 
until  a  pious  soul,  an  English  artist  who  bore  the 
un-English  name  of  SCHARF,  had  recorded  each  name 
and  the  place  of  burial  on  an  elaborate  plat.  Still 
I  cannot  forbear  to  contribute  my  rude  shingle  here 
and  there  to  the  memory  of  my  comrades.  The 
staff-officer  mentioned  here  was  GEORGE  H.  WIL 
LIAMSON,  of  Maryland.  Two  years  before  I  made 
his  acquaintance  Mr.  WILLIAM  M.  BLACKFORD, 
of  Lynchburg,  wrote  in  his  diary,  since  privately 
printed,  under  the  date  July  25,  1862:  Williamson, 
an  interesting  man,  educated  at  Harvard  and  abroad, 
was  a  rising  lawyer  in  Baltimore  when  the  war  broke 
out  and  he  enlisted  as  a  private  in  a  Maryland  regi 
ment. 

A  revival  of  religion  to  counterbalance,  as  it  were,  13 
the  revival  of  brutality,  is  a  recurring  phenomenon 
of  great  wars.  The  tide  of  skepticism  in  Greece  was 
checked  by  the  Persian  War,  and  even  to-day  the 
French  army  shews  a  return  to  the  Man  of  Sorrows, 
whose  effigy  had  been  removed  from  all  public  build 
ings. 

The  Princeton  College  room-mate  who  fell  on  the  16 
1 8th  of  July  was  JAMES  KNOX  LEE,  a  distant  rela 
tive  of  the  great  soldier ;  the  other  was  PEYTON  RAN- 


NOTES 


DOLPH  HARRISON,  of  Martinsburg  (W.)  Va.,  repre 
sentative  of  the  oldest  families  in  the  old  state.  His 
brother,  DABNEY  CARR  HARRISON  (Princeton,  '48), 
another  close  friend,  took  service  in  the  Confederate 
army,  first  as  chaplain,  then  as  captain  of  a  company, 
and  was  killed  at  Fort  Donelson  which,  as  I  painfully 
remember,  was  at  first  reported  as  a  Confederate 
victory. 

17  Thersites — strange  that  Schiller  in  his  Siegeslied 
should   have   forgotten   it — never   lived    to   return. 
According  to  the  Scholia  Vetera  on  Lycophron,  999, 
this   monkey-shaped     (Triflr/Ko/Aop^os)    creature  was 
slain  by  Achilles  for  gouging  out  the  eyes  of  Pen- 
thesilea's  maid,  with  whom  Achilles  had  fallen  in 
love.    A  better  point  was  made  by  Ovid,  that  master 
of  points  (Am.  2,  6,  41)  :    Tristia  Phylacidae  Ther 
sites  funera  vidit. 

18  The  French  artist  was  GUILLAUME,  who  came  to 
this  country  shortly  before  the  war.     In  the  picture 
to  which  I  refer,  General  LEE  was  the  main  figure. 
GUILLAUME'S  picture  of  the  Surrender  at  Appomat- 
tox  bore  evidence  of  minute  study  of  every  detail  of 
that  historic  event. 

19  The  toothbrush  was  a  badge  of  culture  on  both 
sides,  as  the  following  passage  shows : 

"  '  Light  marching  order  '  implies  that  a  soldier 
may  carry  upon  his  person  only  a  few  of  the  more 
obvious  necessities  of  life  and  no  luxuries  save 


NOTES  "3 


tobacco.  But  a  soldier  must  be  clad  even  to  sixty 
rounds  of  ball  cartridge.  Small  wonder  is  it  then,  if 
only  the  lightest  toothbrush  drawn  through  the  but 
tonhole  of  his  blouse  must  suffice  as  an  epitome  of 
the  refinements  of  life.  Many  of  the  victories  of  our 
adversaries  were  fairly  attributed  to  the  scantier  attire 
and  lighter  marching  order  of  the  men." — Atlantic 
Monthly,  May,  1893,  p.  214. 

DAVID  RAMSAY,  grandson  of  the  historian  and  21 
biographer  of  Washington  of  the  same  name,  my 
fellow-student  at  Gottingen  in  1852,  fell  after  heroic 
services  at  Battery  Wagner  in  1863.  What  the  state, 
what  the  country  lost  in  the  promise  of  that  rare  man, 
this  is  not  the  place  to  rehearse.  Scholar,  wit,  em 
bodiment  of  all  the  inherited  social  graces  of  what  we 
once  called  "  the  better  days,"  delightful  companion, 
devoted  and  generous  friend,  he  is  still  in  memory 
part  of  my  life. 

For  Pericles'  budget,  see  Thuc.  2,  13.  24 

Thuc.    I,    141:       rr)V  avrrjv  Svvarai  8ov\<acriv  77   re 

/XCyiCTTT/    Kal    €\a\LCTTY}      SlKCUWCnS      ttTTO     TWV    6/AOtWV    7T/3O 

SIKTJS  rots  TreAas  eTrtTcurcro/Acv^. 

The  friend  was  the  late  A.  MARSHALL  ELLIOTT,  26 
Professor  of  Romance  Languages  in  the  Johns  Hop 
kins,  whose  life  of  study  was  matched  by  a  life  of 
adventure. 

Those  who  suffered  in  Sherman's  March  to  the  27 
Sea — I  was  riveted  to  my  bed  at  the  time — were  not, 


ii4  NOTES 


are  not  so  philosophic.  See  the  narrative  in  BRADLEY 
JOHNSON'S  Life  of  Joseph  E.  Johnston.  Nor  was  I 
so  philosophical  when  I  followed  the  raiders  of  1863, 
nor  when  I  saw  the  fires  that  lighted  up  the  Valley 
of  Virginia  in  1864,  and  that  was  before  the  syste 
matic  devastation  recorded  by  MERRITT,  who  carried 
it  out.  "  When  our  army,"  says  MERRITT  (Battles 
and  Leaders,  4,  512),  "  commenced  its  return  march, 
the  cavalry  was  deployed  across  the  Valley,  burning, 
destroying  or  taking  nearly  everything  of  value,  or 
likely  to  be  of  value  to  the  enemy.  It  was  a  severe 
measure,  and  appears  severer  now  in  the  lapse  of  time, 
but  it  was  necessary  as  a  measure  of  war."  The  plea 
of  1864  was  the  same  as  the  plea  of  1914.  In  a  vivid 
sketch  of  Sherman's  March,  Prof.  HENRY  E.  SHEP 
HERD,  whose  North  Carolina  home,  Fayetteville, 
lay  in  the  track  of  the  invaders  (Battles  and  Leaders, 
4,  678)  winds  up  by  saying  that  the  portrayal  of  it 
"  baffles  all  the  resources  of  literary  art  and  the  afflu 
ence  even  of  our  English  speech,"  and  those  who 
know  Professor  SHEPHERD'S  resources  and  affluence 
will  recognize  the  desperate  nature  of  the  task.  As 
for  the  Valley,  I  have  before  me  a  protest  against  the 
erection  of  a  monument  to  Sheridan,  in  which  the 
writer  gives  an  itemized  account  of  the  havoc  inflicted 
on  the  property  of  non-combatants  in  the  County  of 
Rockingham  alone.  The  protest  reminds  me  of  my 
youthful  surprise  when  I  first  saw  the  statue  of  Tilly 


NOTES  us 


in  the  Feldherrnhalle  at  Munich.  Somehow  I  had 
not  thought  well  of  Tilly  before.  But  all  estimates 
of  military  exigencies  must  be  revised  by  the  light  of 
the  new  standards  of  the  time  in  which  we  live. 
However,  as  this  note  goes  to  the  printer,  I  am  made 
aware  of  an  article  by  Maj.  JOHN  BIGELOW,  U.  S.  A., 
published  in  the  N.  Y.  Times  of  June  13,  1915,  in 
which  the  author  musters  the  evidence  of  the  be 
haviour  of  Sherman's  men.  1864  seems  not  to  have 
been  so  very  far  behind  1914  after  all. 

"  The  hate  of  Celt  to  Saxon,  and  the  contempt  of  28 
Saxon  for  Celt,  simply  paled  and  grew  expression 
less  when  compared  with  the  contempt  and  hate  felt 
by  the  Southron  towards  the  Yankee  anterior  to  our 
Civil  War  and  while  it  was  in  progress.  No 
Houyhnhnms  ever  looked  on  Yahoo  with  greater 
aversion ;  better,  far  better  death  than  further  con 
tamination  through  political  association." — C.  F. 
ADAMS,  Trans-Atlantic  Historical  Solidarity,  p.  176. 

One  recalls  Halleck's  Connecticut : 

Virginians  look 

Upon  them  with  as  favorable  eyes 
As  Gabriel  the  devil  in  paradise. 

Needless  to  say,  the  conspiracy  theory  has  long  been  29 
discarded.    Mr.  PAXSON,  Professor  of  American  His 
tory  in  the  University  of  Wisconsin,  has  devoted  a 
volume  to  shew  that  while  the  South  was  defending 
an  impossible  cause,  it  could  not  hold  different  views 


n6  NOTES 


— that  these  were  the  unavoidable  result  of  environ 
ment  and  natural  resources.  How  different  is  all 
this  from  what  the  N.  Y.  Times  lately  reprinted 
from  its  issue  of  April  17,  1865. 

"  Every  possible  atrocity  appertains  to  this  rebel 
lion.  There  is  nothing  whatever  that  its  leaders  have 
scrupled  at.  Wholesale  massacres  and  torturings, 
wholesale  starvation  of  prisoners,  firing  of  great 
cities,  piracies  of  the  crudest  kind,  persecution  of  the 
most  hideous  character  and  of  vast  extent,  and  finally 
assassination  in  high  places — whatever  is  inhuman, 
whatever  is  brutal,  whatever  is  fiendish,  these  men 
have  resorted  to.  They  will  leave  behind  names  so 
black,  and  the  memory  of  deeds  so  infamous,  that  the 
execration  of  the  slaveholders'  rebellion  will  be 
eternal." 

True,  "  slaveholders'  rebellion  "  still  survives  here 
and  there.  So  WILLIAM  HARRISON  CLARKE,  in  The 
Civil  Service  Law,  Preface,  says: 

"  Parties,  when  they  strive  solely  for  principle,  are 
the  life  of  a  nation ;  but  when  they  strive  solely  for 
pelf,  patronage,  and  power  they  are  its  death.  Even 
corrupt  party  leaders  may  destroy  a  republic;  some 
times  even  ambitious  leaders  may  do  so.  Did  a  nation 
ever  make  a  narrower  escape  than  did  our  own  during 
the  slaveholders'  rebellion?  Who  but  ambitious 
party  leaders  caused  that  rebellion?  " 
31  "  Vous  etes  de  France,  mais  je  suis  de  Bretagne." 


NOTES  117 


"  Eh  bien !  Ce  n'est  pas  le  meme  pays."  "  Mais  c'est 
la  meme  patrie."  La  femme  se  borna  a  repondre, 
"  Je  suis  de  Siscoingnard." — V.  HUGO,  Quatre- 
Vingt-Treize. 

"  The  brandished  sword  of  her  coat  of  arms  would  33 
have  shown  what  manner  of  placida  quies  she  would 
have  ensued."  The  proof-reader  of  the  Atlantic  not 
being  over-familiar  with  the  Massachusetts  coat  of 
arms  (Ense  petit  placldam  sub  Hbertate  quietem)  or 
Scriptural  language,  substituted  for  the  foregoing 
what  one  reads  in  the  article  as  printed  in  the  Atlantic 
(p.  82)  :  "  The  brandished  sword  would  have  shown 

what  manner  of  placida  quies  would  have  ensued 
ii 

The  wish  that  South  Carolina  had  been  scuttled  33 
is  the  wish  of  Chilon  for  Cythera.    Herod.  7,  235. 

This  impression,  erroneous  as  it  seems,  was  contra-  34 
vened  in  a  letter  from  Mr.  WM.  A.  COURTENAY, 
Mayor  and  historian  of  Charleston,  who  wrote  to 
me :  "  The  W.  L.  I.  was  named  for  George  Washing 
ton.  The  22d  of  February  was  celebrated  as  the  anni 
versary  from  1807-92  (thirty  years  ago  in  Fort 
Sumter  under  fire),  and  the  connection  of  the  corps 
with  Col.  Wm.  Washington  was  not  until  April, 
1827,  on  the  presentation  of  the  Eutaw  flag  to  the 
corps  by  his  widow."  However,  the  memory  of  the 
lesser  Washington  is  still  kept  alive,  and  the  William 
Washington  house  is  still  one  of  the  show  places  of 


u8  NOTES 


my  native  city.  As  a  further  illustration  of  local 
patriotism  I  may  add  that  the  Charleston  boys  were 
more  excited  over  the  a8th  of  June,  the  battle  of 
Fort  Moultrie,  than  over  the  national  Fourth  of  July. 
4O  "  I  think  it  is  not  unsafe  to  assert  that  nowhere 
did  the  original  spirit  of  State  Sovereignty  and  alle 
giance  to  the  State  then  survive  in  greater  intensity 
and  more  unquestioning  form  than  in  Virginia — the 
1  Old  Dominion  ' — the  mother  of  States  and  of 
Presidents. 

"  State  pride,  a  sense  of  individuality,  has  imme- 
morially  entered  more  largely  and  more  intensely 
into  Virginia  and  Virginians  than  into  any  other 
section  or  community  of  the  United  States.  Only  in 
South  Carolina  and  among  Carolinians,  on  the  trans- 
Atlantic  continent,  was  a  somewhat  similar  sense  of 
locality  and  obligation  of  descent  to  be  found. 
There  was  in  it  a  flavour  of  the  Hidalgo,  or  of  the 
pride  which  the  MacGregors  and  Campbells  took  in 
their  clan  and  country.  In  other  words,  the  Virgin 
ian  and  Carolinian  had  in  the  middle  of  the  last  cen 
tury,  not  to  any  appreciable  extent,  undergone 
nationalization." — CHAS.  FRANCIS  ADAMS,  Trans- 
Atlantic  Historical  Solidarity  p.  137. 

I  have  referred  to  Mr.  ADAMS  repeatedly  because 
as  a  man  of  my  time  and  nearly  of  my  age  he  under 
stood  the  difficulty  of  moving  the  point  of  view  fifty 
years  backward. 


NOTES  119 


In  these  days  of  mutual  understanding  and  mutual  41 
forgiveness,  I  shall  hardly  be  believed  when  I  say  that 
as  late  as  1885,  twenty  years  after  the  close  of  the 
war,  some  of  my  Northern  friends  who  had  been 
taught  the  duty  of  "  making  treason  odious  "  advised 
me  to  suppress  or  modify  the  following  passage  in  my 
Introduction  to  Pindar  (p.  xii)  as  savoring  of  dis 
loyalty  : 

The  man  whose  love  for  his  country  knows  no  local 
root,  is  a  man  whose  love  for  his  country  is  a  poor 
abstraction ;  and  it  is  no  discredit  to  Pindar  that  he  went 
honestly  with  his  state  in  the  struggle.  It  was  no  treason 
to  Medize  before  there  was  a  Greece,  and  the  Greece  that 
came  out  of  the  Persian  war  was  a  very  different  thing 
from  the  cantons  that  ranged  themselves  on  this  side  and 
on  that  of  a  quarrel  which,  we  may  be  sure,  bore  another 
aspect  to  those  who  stood  aloof  from  it  than  it  wears  in 
the  eyes  of  moderns,  who  have  all  learned  to  be  Hellenic 
patriots.  A  little  experience  of  a  losing  side  might  aid 
historical  vision.  That  Pindar  should  have  had  an  intense 
admiration  of  the  New  Greece,  should  have  felt  the  im 
pulse  of  the  grand  period  that  followed  Salamis  and 
Plataia,  should  have  appreciated  the  woe  that  would  have 
come  on  Greece  had  the  Persians  been  successful,  and 
should  have  seen  the  finger  of  God  in  the  new  evolution  of 
Hellas — all  this  is  not  incompatible  with  an  attitude  dur 
ing  the  Persian  war  that  those  who  see  the  end  and  do 
not  understand  the  beginning  may  not  consider  respectable. 

Of  many  consentient  utterances  I  select  this  one  by  44 
a  prominent  Southerner: 


120  NOTES 


11  The  Confederate  soldiers  did  not  go  to  war  to 
perpetuate  slavery.  Most  of  them  never  owned  a 
slave,  and  our  hero,  Gen.  ROBERT  E.  LEE,  said  that 
if  he  owned  every  one  of  the  slaves  in  the  South  he 
would  give  them  for  the  preservation  of  the  Union. 
It  was  not  for  the  slaves  they  fought,  but  for  prin 
ciple,  for  their  homes  and  native  land." — T.  F. 
GOODE,  Confederate  Banquet,  January  19,  1893. 

43  "  When,  within  our  memory,  some  flippant  Sena 
tor  [Hammond]  wished  to  taunt  the  people  of  this 
country  by  calling  them  *  the  mudsills  of  society,'  he 
paid  them  ignorantly  a  true  praise ;  for  good  men  are 
as  the  green  plain  of  the  earth  is,  as  the  rocks  and  the 
beds  of  the  rivers  are,  the  foundation  and  flooring 
and  sills  of  the  State." — R.  W.  EMERSON,  Atlantic 
Monthly,  January,  1892,  p.  33. 

In  an  oration  delivered  before  the  United  Confed 
erate  Veterans,  June  14, 1904,  RANDOLPH  HARRISON 
McKiM,  a  former  pupil  of  mine  and  a  cousin  of  my 
college  mates  mentioned  on  page  16,  says:  "The 
political  head  of  the  Confederacy  entered  upon  the 
war,  foreseeing  (February,  1861)  the  eventual  loss 
of  his  slaves,  and  the  military  head  of  the  Confederacy 
actually  set  his  slaves  free  before  the  war  was  half 
over." — The  Motives  and  Aims  of  the  Soldiers  of  the 
South  in  the  Civil  War,  p.  28.  The  whole  oration 
confirms  the  positions  taken  in  this  article. 

49      A  recent  historian   of   the  war,   PAXSON    (The 


NOTES  121 


Civil  War,  p.  248),  says:  "  Northern  revenge  in  the 
guise  of  the  preservation  of  the  dearly  won  Union 
was  worse  for  the  South  than  the  war." 

CHARLES  FRANCIS  ADAMS,  /.  c.,  p.  165:  "  Out 
rages,  and  humiliations  worse  than  outrage,  of  the 
period  of  so-called  reconstruction  but  actual  servile 
domination." 

L.  c.,  p.  173:  "  It  may  not  unfairly  be  doubted 
whether  a  people  prostrate  after  civil  conflict  has  ever 
received  severer  measure  than  was  dealt  out  to  the 
so-called  reconstructed  Confederate  States  during  the 
years  immediately  succeeding  the  close  of  strife. 
That  the  policy  inspired  at  the  time  a  feeling  of  bitter 
resentment  in  the  South  was  no  cause  for  wonder." 
To  me  the  cause  for  wonder  was  is  and  that  a  Vir 
ginian  of  Virginians  should  have  wholly  forgotten 
the  bitterness,  as  is  evinced  by  the  following  passage 
in  an  oration  delivered  shortly  after  the  publication 
of  this  article: 

"  No  such  peace  as  our  peace  ever  followed  imme 
diately  upon  such  a  war  as  our  war.  The  exhausted 
South  was  completely  at  the  mercy  of  the  vigorous 
North,  and  yet  the  sound  of  the  last  gun  had  scarcely 
died  away  when  not  only  peace,  but  peace  and  good 
will  were  re-established,  and  the  victors  and  the 
vanquished  took  up  the  work  of  repairing  the  damages 
of  war  and  advancing  the  common  welfare  of  the 
whole  country,  as  if  the  old  relations,  social,  com- 


122  NOTES 


mercial  and  political  between  the  people  of  the  two 
sections  had  never  been  disturbed." — CHARLES  MAR 
SHALL,  of  Lee's  Staff,  on  Grant,  May  30,  1892. 
49  It  was  out  of  the  bitterness  of  this  reconstruction 
period  that  I  penned  the  following  sonnet  to  the 
memory  of  JOHN  M.  DANIEL,  editor  of  the  Rich 
mond  Examiner,  to  which  paper  I  contributed  more 
than  threescore  editorial  articles  during  the  year 

1863-4: 

DIS  MANIBUS 

I.  M.  D. 

We  miss  your  pen  of  fire,  whose  cloven  tongue 
Illum'd  the  good  and  blasted  what  was  base. 
We  miss  you,  fearless  fighter  for  our  race, 

Your  arrows  words,  your  bow  a  will  highstrung. 

We  miss  you,  for  you  tower'd  from  among 
The  herd  of  writers  with  that  careless  grace 
That  springs  from  undisputed  strength.    Your  place 

Is  vacant  still.    Your  bow  is  still  uphung. 

'Tis  well.  This  were  no  time  for  you.    The  strings 
Of  your  proud  heart  forefelt  the  blow  and  broke; 
And  when  you  died,  'twas  better  thus  to  die 

Than  live  to  see  this  swarm  of  crawling  things, 
And  burn  with  words  that  must  remain  unspoke 
Where  "  art  is  tongue-tied  by  authority." 

49  The  school  was  the  Episcopal  High  School  near 
Alexandria,  Virginia ;  the  principal,  the  late  L,  M. 
BLACKFORD. 

ao      Ov.  Her.  3,  106: 

According   to   Ovid,    Briseis   was   a   non-Greek. 


NOTES  123 


Littera,  she  writes  (v.  2),  vix  bene  barbarica  Graeca 
notata  manu.  According  to  recent  authorities,  she 
was  a  Lesbian  girl.  We  know  from  Homer  that 
Achilles  was  musical  as  Odysseus  was  not. 

TOV  8'  cvpov  (j>peva  repTro/zevov  cj>6p[JLiyyL  Atyeny, 
KaAf,  Sat8a\er},  CTTI  8'  apyvpeov  £vyov  rjev. 
-111.  9,  185-6. 

Lesbos  was  an  island  consecrated  to  music  from  so 
the  days  of  Orpheus,  and  we  can  imagine  the  lovers 
singing  together  and  Achilles  solacing  his  loneliness 
by  chanting  to  Patroclus  the  praises  of  his  lost  love. 

The  valued  friend  was  and  is  ARCHER  ANDERSON,  so 
of  Richmond,  Virginia. 

"  Why  is  it  that  wherever  one  goes  in  all  parts  of  Si 
England  one  always  finds — thoroughly  as  I  believe 
the  institution  of  slavery  is  detested  in  this  country — 
every  man  sympathizing  strongly  with  the  Southern 
ers,  and  wishing  them  all  success  ?  We  do  so  for  this 
reason  .  .  .  Englishmen  love  liberty,  and  the  South 
erner  is  fighting,  not  only  for  his  life,  but  for  that 
which  is  dearer  than  life,  for  liberty;  he  is  fighting 
against  one  of  the  most  grinding,  one  of  the  most 
galling,  one  of  the  most  irritating  attempts  to  estab 
lish  tyrannical  government  that  ever  disgraced  the 
history  of  the  World." — G.  W.  BENTINCK,  quoted 
by  CHAS.  FRANCIS  ADAMS,  /.  c.,  p.  1 1 1. 


124  NOTES 


55  The  ambitious  title,  "  Two  Wars,"  has  been  re 
stored  to  the  headline  by  typographical  pressure. 

55  History  is  philosophy  teaching  by  examples.  Ps. 
Dionys.  xi,  2  (399R)  •  icrropia  </>iAocro</>ia  eoTiv  CK 


58     JOHN  AUGUSTIN  WASHINGTON. 

61      SPANGENBERG  was  a  literary  "  bummer."     The 

real  author  was  one  ANDREAS  GUARNA  of  Salerno. 

See  FRANKEL,  Zeitschrift  fur  Litteraturgeschichte, 

xiii,  242. 

61       Pindar's  words  are  :  yAuKi>  8'  aireipoKn  TroAe/ios. 
63      Terror  and  Affright,  II.   15,   19:  <5s  <f>dro  KCU  p 

LTTTTOVS   KeAeTO   Aet/XOV   T6  <f>6j3oV   T€    |    £ciryVV//,ei>.        ThcSC 

horses  of  Ares  furnished  the  names  Deimos  and 
Phobos  for  the  two  satellites  of  the  planet  Mars. 
Such  traces  of  familiarity  with  the  classics  are  refresh 
ing  to  one  who  lives  in  an  age  when  allusion  is  under 
the  ban.  How  many  appreciate  the  appropriateness  of 
the  Baltimore  County  Timonium,  named  after  Mark 
Antony's  growlery  in  Plutarch?  Not  many  of  the 
sports  who  some  years  ago  laid  their  bets  on  Irex 
recalled  the  line  of  the  Odys  ey  13,  86: 


64     The  Scandinavian  scholar,  JESPERSEN. 
ee      Ach.  527. 

68      The    Peloponnesians    called    it    the    Attic    War 
(Thuc.  5,  28,  3)  ;  the  lonians  the  Doric  War.    In  a 


NOTES  125 


recent  number  of  the  Jahrbikher,  xxxv,  No.  2 
(1915),  there  is  a  discussion  of  the  name  of  the 
Peloponnesian  War  apropos  of  the  present  "  World- 
war,"  or,  if  you  choose,  "  Wirrwarr."  For  our  war 
the  misnomer  "  The  Civil  War  "  has  been  adopted  as 
the  official  designation. 

According  to  jama  clamosa,  Winfield  was  origi-  74 
nally  Wingfield,  a  very  common  Virginian  name. 
The  classical  parallel  of  Tromes  and  Atrometos  will 
suggest  itself  to  every  one  who  has  read  Demosthenes. 
Dem.  1  8,  129. 

Thuc.  7,  5>  2:     OVK   ii<J>r)  TO  a  fjid  pr-q  fia  tKtivwv  dXA'  77 


Tyrtaeus  Fr.  8,  23  :  81 

TJ$rj  \€VKOV  c^ovTa  Kapr]  TroXiov  re  yiveiov 
Ovfjiov  aTTOTTveiovr'  a\KLfjiov  lv  Kovlrj. 

The  first  line  is  taken  from  II.  22,  74.  I  do  not 
continue  the  citation  because  the  Homeric  passage 
has  not  been  subjected  to  the  refining  process  of  Mr. 
MURRAY'S  redactors  of  the  Iliad. 

The  Bloody  Angle,  May  12,  1864,  an  unforgct-  82 
table  date. 

Girl  in  the  Carpathians  and  Scholar  in  Politics  83 
are  titles  of  current  publications  taken  at  random 
to  illustrate  the  personal  element  and  its  unfitness. 

dKov'eis  Alffxivif]  ;    Dem.    18,    112.     My  Millwood  83 
friend  was  a  scholar  of  the  old  times  and  would  not 


126  NOTES 


have  paused  to  consider  whether  the  omission  of    <5 

was  due  to  scorn  of  Aeschines  or  dread  of  the  hiatus. 
92      Gresham's  law  was  anticipated  by  Aristophanes, 

Ran.  718,  foil. 
97      As  is  well  known,  the  Greek  had  a  mania  for 

shoes.     For  women's  shoes  see  Av.  Lys.  427.     For 

other  cordwainer's  wares,  /.  c.,  1  10. 
1O1      Almost  as  touching  as  the  pluralis  maiestaticus  of 

"  those  molasses  "  is  the  Scythian  archer's  personifica 

tion  of  honey  as  'ATTIKO?  /xe'Ais,  Ar.  Thesm.  1  192. 


POSTSCRIPT.  —  The  bulk  of  the  Notes  would  have  been 
greatly  augmented,  if  I  had  undertaken  to  explain  1892  as 
well  as  1865  to  the  children  of  1915.  In  1892  Mr.  CAR 
NEGIE  (p.  19)  was  not  yet  the  benefactor  of  the  outworn 
members  of  my  own  profession,  and  Mr.  CHARLES  FRANCIS 
ADAMS  was  declaiming  against  the  College  Fetich  to  which 
I  have  borne  a  life  long  allegiance.  To  some  of  my  own 
allusions  I  have  lost  the  clue  and  find  myself  in  the  cate 
gory  with  which  BROWNING  has  made  the  world  familiar. 


CONTEMPORANEOUS  OPINIONS 
OF  THE  NORTHERN  PRESS 


CONTEMPORANEOUS  OPINIONS  OF 
THE  NORTHERN  PRESS 

"  A  poetical  view  of  the  Southern  cause  in  the 
Civil  War."— The  Nation,  January,  1892. 

"  An  attempt  on  the  part  of  Professor  Gildersleeve 
to  make  the  Creed  of  the  Old  South  seem  a  little  less 
absurd  than  it  has  for  twenty  years  past." — Spring 
field  Republican. 

"  Professor  B.  L.  Gildersleeve  states  the  Creed  of 
the  Old  South  in  a  way  to  make  every  Northern 
man  respect  those  who  took  up  arms  like  General 
Lee  under  the  conviction  that  the  State  had  the  first 
claim  upon  their  allegiance.  The  writer  would  have 
strengthened  this  sympathy,  however,  did  he  show 
that  he  had  been  docile  to  the  stern  teacher,  expe 
rience,  and  had  come  to  reject  the  parochial  creed  of 
state  rights." — Literary  World,  January  2,  1892. 

"  I  hope  it  is  not  improper  to  add  that  wherever, 
in  all  Christendom,  there  is  hearty  appreciation  of 
profound  learning  allied  to  conscience  and  to  a  re 
fined  life,  the  recent  paper  of  the  Johns  Hopkins  pro 
fessor  of  philology  will  be  taken  as  conclusive  proof 
that  good  and  true  and  able  men  could  uphold  the 
cause  of  the  Confederacy  even  in  arms,  and  never 
doubt  in  their  hearts  that  they  were  right." — JACOB 
DOLSON  Cox,  "  Why  the  Men  of  '61  Fought  for  the 
Union,"  Atlantic  Monthly,  March,  1892. 


CORRECTIONS. 

p.  108,  1.  18,  for  'Weir'  read  '  Weyer'. 

in,  1.  27,  LEE'S  middle  name  was  KENDALL, 
not  KNOX. 

U5,  1.  23,  read  'As  Gabriel  on  the  devil'. 

121,  1.  15,  read  'was  and  is'. 

J23,  1.    6,  for  £vy6v  read  £vyo*>. 

124,  1.  6,  read  AUGUSTINE,  'as  always  in 
the  Washington  family '  w.  GOR 
DON  McCABE. 

126,  1.    6,  for  427  read  417. 


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